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The Tiber and the Thames. 



THE TIBER 



AXD 



THE THAMES 



Their Associations, Past and Present. 



WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. 



V 



W„ 







PHILADELPHIA 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, bj 

J. 1?. 1 IPPINCOTT & CO . 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, .-.: Washington. 



THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 






?C 






FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 






i 



TWO PAPERS. — I. 







NEAR THE SOURCE OF "HE TIBER. 



ECCE TIBERIM !" cried the Ro- 
man legions when they first be- 
held the Scottish Tay. What power of 
association could have made them see 
in the clear and shallow stream the like- 
ness of their tawny Tiber, with his full- 
flowing waters sweeping down to the sea ? 
Perhaps those soldiers under whose mail- 
ed and rugged, breasts lay so tender a 
thought of home came from the norther- 
ly region among the Apennines, where 
a little bubbling mountain-brook is the 
first form in which the storied Tiber 
greets the light of day. One who has 
made a pilgrimage from its mouth to its 
source thus describes the spot : "An old 
man undertook to be our guide. By the 
side of the little stream, which here con- 
stitutes the first vein of the Tiber, we 
penetrated the wood. It was an im- 
mense beech-forest. . . . The trees were 
almost all great gnarled veterans who 
had borne the snows of many winters : 



now they stood basking above their 
blackened shadows in the blazing sun- 
shine. The little stream tumbled from 
ledge to ledge of splintered rock, some- 
times creeping into a hazel thicket, green 
with long ferns and soft moss, and then 
leaping once more merrily into the sun- 
light. Presently it split into numerous 
little rills. We followed the longest of 
these. It led us to a carpet of smooth 
green turf amidst an opening in the trees; 
and there, bubbling out of the green sod, 
embroidered with white strawberry-blos- 
soms, the delicate blue of the crane'sbill 
and dwarf willow-herb, a copious little 
stream arose. Here the old man paused, 
and resting upon his staff, raised his age- 
dimmed eyes, and pointing to the gush- 
ing water, said, 'E questo si chiama il 
Tevere a Roma /' (' And this is called 
the Tiber at Rome!') . . . We followed 
the stream from the spot where it issued 
out of the beech-forest, over barren spurs 

5 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



of the mountains crested with fringes of 
dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate 
valley, shut in by dim and misty blue 
peaks. Then we entered the portals of 
a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees 
everywhere around us and impenetrable 
foliage above our heads, the deep silence 
only broken by fitful songs of birds. To 
this succeeded a blank district of barren 
shale cleft into great gullies by many a 
wintry torrent. Presently we found our- 
selves at an enormous height above the 
river, on the ledge of a precipice which 
shot down almost perpendicularly on one 
side to the bed of the stream. ... A lit- 
tle past this place we came upon a very 
singular and picturesque spot. It was 
an elevated rock shut within a deep dim 
gorge, about which the river twisted, al- 
most running round it. Upon this rock 
were built a few gloomy-looking houses 
and a quaint, old-world mill. It was 
reached from the hither side by a wide- 
ly-spanning one-arched bridge. It was 
called Val Savignone."* Beyond this, 



at a small village called Balsciano, the 
hills begin to subside into gentler slopes, 
which gradually merge in the plain at 
the little town of Pieve San Stefano. 

Thus far the infant stream has no his- 
tory : its legends and chronicles do not 
begin so early. But a few miles farther, 
on a tiny branch called the Singerna, are 
the vestiges of what was once a place of 
some importance — Caprese, where Mi- 
chael Angelo was born exactly four hun- 
dred years ago. His father was for a 
twelvemonth governor of this place and 
Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsen- 
na's Clusium, which is to the south, but 
Clusium Novum), and brought his wife 
with him to inhabit the pahxzzo commu- 
nale. During his regency the painter 
of the "Last Judgment," the sculptor of 
"Night and Morning," the architect of 
St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. 
Here the history of the Tiber begins— 
here men first mingled blood with its 
unsullied waves. On another little trib- 
utary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terri- 




CAPRESE. 



ble battle was fought between the Milan- 
ese troops, under command of the gal- 

* The Pilgrimage cf ike Tiber, by Wm, Davies. 



lant free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren- 
tines, led by Giovanni Paolo (commonly 
called Giampaolo) Orsini ; and a little 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 





LAKE THRASIMENE. 



farther, on the main stream, Citta di Cas- 
tello recalls the story of a long siege 
which it valiantly sustained against Brac- 
cio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio 
(Strongarm), another renowned soldier 
of fortune of the fifteenth century. 

As the widening flood winds on through 
the beautiful plain, a broad sheet of water 
on the right spreads for miles to the foot 
of the mountains, whose jutting spurs 
form many a bay, cove and estuary. It 
was in the small hours of a night of misty 
moonlight that our eyes, stretched wide 
with the new wonder of beholding classic 
ground, first caught sight of this smooth 
expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark, 
blurred outlines of the landscape and 
trees. The monotonous noise and mo- 
tion of the train had put our fellow-trav- 
elers to sleep, and when it gradually 
ceased they did not stir. There was no 
bustle at the little station where we stop- 
ped ; a few drowsy figures stole silently 
by in the dim light, like ghosts on the 
spectral shore of Acheron ; the whole 
scene was strangely unreal, phantasmal. 
"What can it be ?" we asked each other 
under our breaths. "There is but one 
thing that it can be — Lake Thrasimene." 
And so it was. Often since, both by 



starlight and daylight, we have seen that 
watery sheet of fatal memories, but it nev- 
er wore the same shadowy yet impressive 
aspect as on our first night-journey from 
Florence to Rome. 

Not far from here one leaves the train 
for Perugia, seated high on a bluff amid 
walls and towers. We had been told a 
good deal of the terrors of the way — how 
so steep was the approach that at a cer- 
tain point horses give out and carriages 
must be dragged up by oxen. It was 
with some surprise, therefore, that we 
saw ordinary hotel omnibuses and car- 
riages waiting at the station. But we did 
not allow ourselves to feel any false se- 
curity : by and by we knew the tug must 
come. We set off by a wide, winding 
road, uphill undoubtedly, but smooth and 
easy : however, this was only the begin- 
ning; and as it grew steeper and steeper, 
we waited in trepidation for the moment 
when the heavy beasts should be hitch- 
ed on to haul us up the acclivity. We 
crawled up safely and slowly between 
orchards of olive trees, which will grow 
wherever a goat can set its foot : beneath 
us the great fertile vale of Umbria spread 
like a lake, the encircling mountains, 
which had looked like a close chain from 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



below, unlinking themselves to reveal 
gorges and glimpses of other valleys. 
Thus by successive zigzags we mounted 
the broad turnpike-road, now directly 
under the fortifications, now farther off, 
until we saw them close above us, with 
the old citadel and the new palace. And 
now surely the worst had come, but the 
carriage turned a sharp corner, showing 
two more zigzags, forming a long acute 
angle which carried us smoothly to the 
rocky plateau on which the city stands, 
and we bowled in through the old gate- 
way at a round trot, with the usual crack- 
ing of whips and rattling and jingling of 
harness which announces the arrival of 
travelers at minor places on the Conti- 
nent. 

We were not comfortable at Perugia — 
and let no one think to be so until there 
is a new hotel on a new principle — but 
it is a place where one can afford to fore- 
go creature comforts. Of all the towns 
on the Tiber, so rich in heirlooms of an- 
tiquity and art, none can boast such va- 
rious wealth as this. The moment one 
leaves the centre of the town, which is 
built on a table of rock, the narrow streets 
plunge down on every side like danger- 
ous broken flights of stairs : they disap- 
pear under deep cavernous arches, so that 
if you are below they seem to lead straight 
up through the darkness to the soft blue 
heaven, while from above they seem to 
go straight down into deep cellars, but 
cellars full of slanting sunshine. And 
whether you look up or down, there is 
always a picture in the dark frame against 
the bright background — a woman in a 
scarlet kerchief with a water-vessel of 
antique form, or a ragged brown boy 
leading a ragged brown donkey, or a 
soldier in gay uniform striking a light 
for his pipe. As soon as you leave the 
live part of the town, with the few little 
caffes and shops, and the esplanades 
whence the thrice-lovely landscape un- 
folds beneath your gaze, you wander 
among quiet little paved piazzas with a 
bit of daisied grass in their midst, sur- 
rounded by great silent buildings, whence 
through some opening you descry a street 
which is a ravine, and the opposite cliff 
rising high above you piled close with 



gray houses overhung with shrubs and 
creepers, and little gardens in their crev- 
ices like weeds between the stones of a 
wall ; or you come out upon a secluded 
gallery with tall, deserted-looking man- 
sions on one hand — except that at some 
sunny window there is always to be seen 
a girl's head beside a pot of carnations 
or nasturtiums — and on the other a para- 
pet over which you lean to see the town 
scrambling up the hillside, while a great 
breadth of valley and hill and snow- 
covered mountain stretches away below. 
Then what historical associations, strag- 
gling away across three thousand years 
to when Perugia was one of the thirty 
cities of Etruria, and kept her independ- 
ence through every vicissitude until Au- 
gustus starved her out in 40 B. c. ! Por- 
tions of the wall, huge smooth blocks of 
travertine stone, are the work of the van- 
ished Etruscans, and fragments of sev- 
eral gateways, with Roman alterations. 
One is perfect, imbedded in the outer 
wall of the castle : it has a round-headed 
arch, with six pilasters, in the intervals 
of which are three half-length human 
figures and two horses' heads. On the 
southern slope of the hill, three miles 
beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan 
tombs were accidentally discovered by a 
peasant a few years ago. The outer en- 
trance alone had suffered, buried under 
the rubbish of two millenniums : the 
burial-place of the Volumnii has been 
restored externally after ancient Etrus- 
can models, but within it has been left 
untouched. Descending a long flight of 
stone steps, which led into the heart of 
the hill, we passed through a low door 
formerly closed by a single slab of trav- 
ertine, too ponderous for modern hinges. 
At first we could distinguish nothing 
in the darkness, but by the uncertain 
flaring of two candles, which the guide 
waved about incessantly, we saw a cham- 
ber hewn in the rock, with a roof in im- 
itation of beams and rafters, all of solid 
tufa stone. A low stone seat against the 
wall on each hand and a small hanging 
lamp were all the furniture of this apart- 
ment, awful in its emptiness and mys- 
tery. On every side there were dark 
openings into cells whence came gleams 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



of white, indefinite forms: a great Gor- 
gon's head gazed at us from the ceiling, 
and from the walls in every direction 



started the crested heads and necks of 
sculptured serpents. We entered one by 
one the nine small grotto-like compart- 




ments which surround the central cavern : 
the white shapes turned out to be cinerary 
urns, enclosing the ashes of the three 
thousand years dead Volumnii. Urns, 



as we understand the word, they are not, 
but large caskets, some of them alabas- 
ter, on whose lids recline male figures 
draped and garlanded as for a feast : the 



FOl l OWING THE TIBER, 



faces rtiffei so much in feature and ex- 
pre ision thai one i an hardly doubt their 
being likenesses; the figures, it erect, 
would be nearly two feet in height. The 
sides oi these -little sarcophagi are cov- 
ered with bassi-rilitvii many ol them 
finely executed ; the subje< ts are i om 
bats .ind that favorite theme the boai 
hunt "i Kalydon; there was one which 
represented the sacrifice of a child. The 
Medusa's head, as it is thought to be, 
recurs constantly, treated with extraordi 
nary power : we were divided among our- 
selves whethei it was Medusa or an Erin 
nys with winged head. The sphinx ap 
pears several times; there are four on the 
corners ol an alabastei urn in the shape 
ot .1 temple, exquisite in form and fea 
tures, and exceedingly delicate in work 
manship, Bulls' heads, with garlands 
drooping between them, a well known 
ornament ol antique altars, are among 
the de< orations. But fai the most beauti 
(ul objects were the little hanging figures, 
which seemed to have been lamps ol .1 
green bronse color, though we won- as- 
sured that they are tt$ m cotta ; they are 
male figures oi exquisite grace and beau 
tv, with a lightness and airiness common 
K given to Mercury; but these had large 
angel pinions on the shoulders, and none 
on the lu-.ui or feet. There was not .1 
icholai in the party, so we all returned 
unenlightened, but profoundly interested 
and impressed, and with that delightful 
sense ol stimulated curiosity which is 
worth more than all Eurekas, With the 
ex< eption ol a fev> weapons and trinkets, 
which we saw at the museum, this is all 
that remains of the might} Etruscans, 
save the shapes ol the common red pot- 
ter) which is spread out wholesale in 
the open space opposite the cathedral on 
market days the most graceful and use- 
ful which could be devised, and which 
have not changed their model since eai 

licr days than the OCCUpantS Oi those 

tonih> could remember, 

rhe Conquering Roman has left his 

sign-manual everywhere, but one is so 

used to him in Italj th.u the scantier 

records ol latei ages interest us more 
here. Lake ever} othei old Italian town. 
Perugia had u.s great family, the Bagli- 



oni, who lorded it over the place, some- 
times harshly and cruelly enough, some- 
times generously and splendidly — pro- 

te< tors of popular rights and patrons ol 

art and Letters. Their mediaeval history 
is full of picturesque incident and dra- 
matic catastrophe : it would make a most 

romantic volume, hut a thick, one. At 
length the PerUgianS, master and men, 

grew too turbulent, and Pope Paul ill. 

put them down, a\\o[ sat upon them, SO 

to speak, by building the citadel. 

Hut time would tail us to tell of the 

Baglioni, or Pope Paul the Borghese, or 
Fortebraccio, the chivalric condottiert 
who led the Perugians to wai against 
then neighbors of Todi, or even the still 
burning memories of the sack ol Perugia 
by command ot" the present pope. We 
cm no longer turn our thoughts from 
the treasures of an which make Perugia 
rich above all cities of the Tiber, save 

Rome alone. We cannot tarry before 

the cathedral, noble despite its incom- 
pleteness and the unsightly alterations 
ot later times, and full of line paintings 
and matchless wood carvnn; and wrought 
metal and piocious sculptures; noi he 
toie the PalailO t/ommunalc. another 

grand Gothic wreck, equally dignified 

and degraded ; nor even beside the great 

fountain erected si\ hundred wars ago 
by Nicolo and Giovanni o\.\ Pisa, the 
chiefs and founders of the Tuscan school 

ot' sculpture ; nor beneath the statue of 
Pope Julius 111., which Hawthorne has 
made known to all ; for there are a score 
ot churches and palaces, each with its 
priceless Peruglno, and drawings and 
designs by his pupil Raphael in his love- 
ly "tii st manner," which has so much oi 
the Eden-like innocence oi his master; 
and the Ac.nlcmv oi Fine Aits, where 

one may study the LTmbrian school at 

leisure; and last, but not least, the Sala 

del Cambio, or Hall o\ Exchange, where 
Perugino may be seen in his glory, it 

is not a hall oi imposing sic. SO that 
nothing interferes with the impression 
oi the frescoes which gate upon you 
from every side as you enter. Or no; 

they do not gate upon you noi return 

n out glance, but look sweetly and se- 
renely forth, as if with eyes never bent 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



i i 




TODI. 



on earthly things. The right-hand wall 
is dedicated to the sibyls and prophets, 
the left to the greatest sages and heroes 
of antiquity. There is something capri- 
cious or else enigmatical in the mode of 
presenting many of them — the dress, at- 
titude and general appearance often sug- 
gest a very different person from the one 
intended — but the grace and loveliness 
of some, the dignity and elevation of 
others, the expression of wisdom in this 
face, of celestial courage in that, the calm 
and purity and beauty of all, give them 
an indescribable charm and potency. At 
the end of the room facing the door are 
the "Nativity" and "Transfiguration," 
the latter, infinitely beautiful and relig- 
ious, full of quiet concentrated feeling. 
We were none of us critics : none of us 
had got beyond the stage when the sen- 
timent of a work of art is what most af- 
fects our enjoyment of it; and we all 
confessed how much more impressive to 
us was this Transfiguration, with its three 
quiet spectators, than the world-famous 
one at the Vatican. Although there are 
masterpieces of Perugino's in nearly 
every great European collection, I can- 
not but think one must go to Perugia to 
appreciate fully the limpid clearness, the 



pensive, tranquil suavity, which reigns 
throughout his pictures in the counte- 
nances, the landscape, the atmosphere. 
We found it hard to rob Perugia even 
of a day for a pilgrimage to the tomb of 
Saint Francis at Assisi, yet could not 
leave the neighborhood without making 
it. We took the morning-train for the 
little excursion, meaning to drive back, 
and crossed the Tiber for the first time 
on the downward journey at Ponte San 
Giovanni. We got out at the station of 
Santa Maria degli Angeli, so named from 
the immense church built over the cell 
where Saint Francis lived and died and 
the little chapel where he prayed. The 
Porzionuncula it was called, or "little 
share," being all that he deemed needful 
for man's abode on earth, and more than 
needful. It was hither that he came in 
the heyday of youth, forsaking the house 
of his wealthy father, the love of his 
mother, a life of pleasure with his gay 
companions, and dedicated himself to 
poverty and preaching the word of God. 
One of our party had said that she con- 
sidered Saint Francis the author of much 
evil, and as having done irreparable 
harm to the Italian people in sanctifying 
dirt and idleness. But apostles are not 



12 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



to be judged by the abuse of their doc- 
trine ; and although it cannot be denied 
that Saint Francis encouraged beggary 
by forbidding his followers to possess 
aught of their own, he enjoined that 
they should labor with their hands for 
several hours daily. And to me it seem- 
ed as if out of Palestine there could be no 
spot of greater significance and sacred- 
ness to any Christian than this, where in 
a sanguinary and licentious 
age a young man suddenly 
broke all the bonds of self, and 
taught in his own person hu- 
mility, renunciation and broth- 
erly love as they had hardly 
been taught since his Master's 
death. The sternness of his 
personal self-denial is only 
equaled by his sweetness to- 
ward all living things: not 
men alone, but animals, birds, 
Ashes, the frogs, the crickets, 
shared his love, and were call- 
ed brother and sister by him. 
The great and instantaneous 
movement which he produced in his own 
time was no short-lived blaze of fanat- 
icism, for its results have lasted from the 
twelfth century to our own ; and although 
we may well believe that the day is past 
for serving Christ by going barefoot and 
living on alms, the spirit of Saint Fran- 
cis's doctrine, charity, purity, self-abne- 
gation, might do as much for modern 
men as for those of six hundred years 
ago. Believing all this, we were not 
sorry that our uncompromising friend 
had stayed behind, and it was in a rev- 
erent mood that we left the little stone 
chamber — which shrinks to lowlier pro- 
portions by contrast with the enormous 
dome above it — and turned to climb the 
long hill which leads to the magnificent 
monument which enthusiasm raised over 
him who in life had coveted so humble 
a home. 

The cliff on which Assist stands rises 
abruptly on the side toward the Tiber : 
long lines of triple arches, which look as 
if hewn in the living stone, stretch along 
its face, one above another, like galleries, 
the great mass of the church and con- 
vent, with its towers and gables and spire- 



like cypress trees, crowning all. It is 
this marriage of the building to the rock, 
these lower arcades which rise halfway 
between the valley and the plateau seek- 
ing the help of the solid crag to sustain 
the upper ones and the vast superimposed 
structure, that makes the distant sight 
of Assisi so striking, and almost over- 
whelms you with a sense of its greatness 
as the winding road brings you close be- 




CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI. 



low on your way up to the town. It is a 
triple church. The uppermost one, be- 
gun two years after the saint's death, has 
a magnificent Gothic west front and high 
steps leading from the piazza, and a rich 
side-portal with a still higher flight lead- 
ing from a court on a lower level. As 
we entered, the early afternoon sun was 
streaming in through the immense rose- 
window and flooding the vast nave, illu- 
mining the blue star-studded vault of the 
lofty roof and the grand, simple frescoes 
of Cimabue and Giotto on the walls. 
Thence we descended to the second 
church, in whose darkness our vision 
groped, half blind from the sudden 
change ; but gradually through the dusk 
we began to discern low vaults stretch- 
ing heavily across pillars which look like 
stunted giants, so short are they and so 
tremendously thick-set, the high altar 
enclosed by an elaborate grating, the 
little side-chapels like so many black 
cells, and through the gloom a twinkle 
and glimmer of gold and color and motes 
floating in furtive sunbeams that had 
strayed in through the superb stained 
glass of the infrequent windows. The 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



13 



frescoes of Giotto and his school enrich 
every spandril and interspace with their 
simple, serious forms — no other such 
place to study the art of that early day 
— but a Virgin enthroned among saints 
by Lo Spagna, a disciple of Perugino's, 
made a pure light in the obscurity : it 
had all the master's golden transparency, 
like clear shining after the rain. From 
this most solemn and venerable place 
we went down to the lowest church, the 
real sepulchre : it was darker than the 
one we had left, totally dark it seemed 
to me, and contracted, although — it is in 
the form of a Greek cross — each arm is 
sixty feet : in fact, it is only a crypt of 
unusual size ; and although here were 
the saint's bones in an urn of bronze, we 
were conscious of a weakening of the 
impression made by the place we had 
just left. No doubt it is because the 
crypt is of this century, while the other 
two churches are of the thirteenth. 

There are other things to be seen at 
Assisi ; and after dining at the little Al- 
bergo del Leone, which, like every part 
of the town except the churches, is re- 
markably clean, my companion set out 
to climb up to the castle, and I wandered 
back to the great church. As I sat idly 
on the steps a monk accosted me, and 
finding that I had not seen the convent, 
carried me through labyrinthine corri- 
dors and galleries, down long flights of 
subterranean stone steps, one after an- 
other, until I thought we could not be 
far from the centre of the earth, when he 
suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister 
with high arched openings and led me 
to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the 
glory, the wonder of the sight ! We 
were halfway down the mountain-side, 
hanging between the blue heaven and 
the billowy Umbrian plain, with its ver- 
dure and its azure fusing into tints of 
dreamy softness as they vanished in the 
deep violet shadows of thick -crowding 
mountains, on whose surfaces and gorges 
lay changing colors of the superbest in- 
tensity. Poplars and willows showed 
silvery among the tender green of other 
deciduous trees in their fresh spring fo- 
liage and the deep velvet of the immor- 
tal cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, 



which looked like little puffs of pink and 
white cloud resting on the bosom of the 
valley. A small, clear mountain-stream 
wound round the headland to join the 
Tiber, which divides the landscape with 
its bare, pebbly bed. It was almost the 
same view that one has from twenty 
places in Perugia, but coming out upon 
it as from the bowels of the earth, framed 
in its huge stone arch, it was like open- 
ing a window from this world into Para- 
dise. 

Slowly and lingeringly I left the cloi- 
ster, and panted up the many steps back 
to the piazza to await my companion and 
the carriage which was to take us back to 
Perugia. The former was already there, 
and in a few minutes a small omnibus 
came clattering down the stony street, 
and stopping beside us the driver inform- 
ed us that he had come for us. Our sur- 
prise and wrath broke forth. Hours be- 
fore we had bespoken a little open car- 
riage, and it was this heavy, jarring, jolt- 
ing vehicle which they had sent to drive 
us ten miles across the hills. The driver 
declared, with truly Italian volubility and 
command of language and gesture, that 
there was no other means of conveyance 
to be had ; that it was excellent, swift, 
admirable ; that it was what the signori 
always went from Assisi to Perugia in ; 
that, in fine, we had engaged it, and must 
take it. My companion hesitated, but I 
had the advantage here, being the one 
who could speak Italian ; so I prompt- 
ly replied that we would not go in the 
omnibus under any circumstances. The 
whole story was then repeated with more 
adjectives and superlatives, and gestures 
of a form and pathos to make the fortune 
of a tragic actor. I repeated my refusal. 
He began a third time : I sat down on 
the steps, rested my head on my hand 
and looked at the carvings of the portal. 
This drove him to frenzy : so long as you 
answer an Italian he gets the better of 
you ; entrench yourself in silence and he 
is impotent. The driver's impotence first 
exploded in fury and threats : at least we 
should pay for the omnibus, for his time, 
for his trouble ; yes, pay the whole way 
to Perugia and back, and his buoii" j/nino 
besides. All the beggars who haunt the 



14 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



sanctuary of their patron had gathered 
about us, and from playing Greek chorus 
now began to give us advice: "Yes, we 
would do well to go : the only carriage in 
Assisi, and excellent, admirable !" The 
numbers of these vagrants, their offici- 
ousness, their fluency, were bewildering. 
" But what are we to do ?" asked my anx- 
ious companion. "Why, if it comes to 
the worst, walk down to the station and 
take the night-train back." He walked 
away whistling, and I composed myself 
to a visage of stone and turned my eyes 
to the sculptures once more. Suddenly 
the driver stopped short : there was a 
minute's pause, and then I heard a voice 
in the softest accents asking for some- 
thing to buy a drink. I turned round — 
beside me stood the driver hat in hand : 
" Yes, the signora is right, quite right : I 
go, but she will give me something to get 
a drink?" I nearly laughed, but, biting 
my lips, I said firmly, "A drink? Yes, 
if it be poison." The effect was astound- 
ing : the man uttered an ejaculation, 
crossed himself, mounted his box and 
drove oft"; the beggars shrank away, 
stood aloof and exchanged awestruck 
whispers; only a few liquid-eyed little 
ragamuffins continued to turn somersets 
and stand on their heads undismayed. 



Half an hour elapsed : the sun was 
beginning to descend, when the sound 
of wheels was again heard, and a light 
wagon with four places and a brisk lit- 
tle horse came rattling down the street. 
A pleasant-looking fellow jumped down, 
took oft" his hat and said he had come 
to drive us to Perugia. We jumped up 
joyfully, but I asked the price. "Fifty 
francs" — a sum about equivalent to fifty 
dollars in those regions. I smiled and 
shook my head : he eagerly assured me 
that this included his buori mano and 
the cost of the oxen which we should be 
obliged to hire to drag us up some of 
the hills. I shook my head again : he 
shrugged and turned as if to go. My 
unhappy fellow-traveler started forward : 
" Give him whatever he asks and let us 
get away." I sat down again on the 
steps, saying in Italian, as if in soliloquy, 
that we should have to go by the train, 
after all. Then the new-comer cheer- 
fully came back: "Well, signora, what- 
ever you please to give." I named half 
his price — an exorbitant sum, as I well 
knew — and in a moment more we were 
skimming along over the hard, smooth 
mountain-roads : we heard no more of 
those mythical beasts the oxen, and in 
two hours were safe in Perugia. 




FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 

CONCLUDING PAPER. 




o 



TEMPLE OF THE CLITUMNUS. 

NE branch of the little river which I nus. the delight of philosophers and 
encompasses Assisi is the Clitum- | poets in the Augustan age. Near its 

'5 



i6 



EO//Oir/Xu THE TIFER. 



source stands ■ beautiful little temple 
to the divinity of the stream. Although 
the ancients resorted hithei foi the love 




[HE PAl LS 01 VKKM. 

liness of the spot, they did not bathe in 
the springs, .1 gentle superstition hold- 
ing u sacrilege for the human bo< 
lave itsolt in a stream neai 



They came by the Via Klaminia, the old 
high-road from Rome to Florence, which 
crosses the modern railroad hard by, 
Following its course, which takes a more 
direct line than the devious riber, past 
Spoleto on us woody castellated height, 
the traveler reaches Terni on the tumul- 
tuous Nar, the wildest and mosl rebel- 
lions of .ill the tributaries, it was to 
save the surrounding country from its 
outbreaks that the channel was made by 
the Romans b. c. 171, the first oi several 
experiments which resulted in these cas- 
cades, winch have been more sung and 
oftener painted than any other in the 
world, The beauty of Terni is so hack- 
neved that enthusiasm over it becomes 
cockney, yet the beauty o( hackneyed 
things is as eternal as the veritj of tru- 
isms, and no more loses its charm than 
the other its point. But one must not 
talk about it. The foaming torrent rages 
along between us rocky walls until span- 
ned by the bridge of Augustus at Narni. 

a magnificent viaduct sixty feet high, 
thrown from ridge to ridge across the 

ravine tor the passage of the Klammian 
Way a wreck now. for two of the arches 
have fallen, but through the last there is 
a glimpse of the rugged hillsides with 
their thick forests and the turbulent wa- 
ters rushing through the chasm. Higher 
still is Narni, looking over her embattled 
walls. It is one oi the most striking po- 
sitions on the w ay from Florence to Rome, 
and the nest halt' hour, through savage 
gorges and black tunnels, ever 1\ 
the tormented waters ot" the Nar until 
they meet the Tiber, swollen by the trib- 
utes ot' the PagUa and Chiana, is singu- 
larly tine. 

Where the Paglia and Chiana tlow to- 
gether, at the issue ot' the charming Val 
di Chiana. stands Orvieto on its steep 
and sudden lock, ctowncd with one of 
the triumphs ot" Italian Gothic, the gh> 
i cathedral. Alter toiling up the 
ladder-like paths which lead from the 
plain to the summit ot' the bluff, and 
passing through the grand mediaeval 
gateway along the slanting streets, where 
even the peasants dismount and walk 
beside their donkeys, seeing nothing 
in the whole small compass ot" the 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



>7 




walls save what speaks of the narrowest 
and humblest life in the most remote of 
hill-fastnesses, a few deserted and dilap- 
idated palaces alone telling of a period 
of importance long past, nothing can 
describe the effect of coming out of this 
indigence and insignificance upon the 
silent, solitary piazza where the incom- 
parable cathedral rears its front, covered 
from base to pinnacle with the richest 
sculpture and most brilliant mosaic. The 
volcanic mass on which the town is built 
is over seven hundred feet high, and 
nearly half as much in circumference: 
it would be a fitting pedestal for this 
gorgeous duomo if it stood there alone. 
But it is almost wedged in among the 
crooked streets, a few paces of grass- 
grown stones allowing less than space 
enough to embrace the whole result of 
proportion and color: one cannot go far 
enough off to escape details. An ac- 
count of those details would require a 
volume, and one has already been writ- 
ten which leaves no more to be said;* 
yet fain would we take the reader with 
us into that noble nave, where the "glo- 
rious company of the apostles 1 ' stands 
colossal in marble beside the pillars 
whose sculptured capitals are like leafy 

• Travel and Art Miufy hi Italy, \>y C. E. Nouton. 

2 



branches blown by the wind; where the 
light conies rich and mellow through 
stained glass and scmilucent alabaster, 
like Indian-summer sunshine in autumn 
woods; where Kra Angclico's and lie- 
nozzo Gozzoli's angelic host smile upon 
us with ineffable mildness from above the 
struggle and strife of Luca Signorelli's 
"Last Judgment," the great forerunner 
of Michael Angelo's. It added greatly 
to the impressivencss that there was never 
a single human being in the cathedral : 
except one afternoon at vespers we had 
it all to ourselves. There is little else to 
sec in the place, although it is highly 
picturesque and the inhabitants wear a 
more complete costume than any other 
I saw in Italy — the women, bright bod- 
ices, striped skirts and red stockings; 
the men, jaunty jackets and breeches, 
peaked hats and splendid sashes. 

The discomfort of Perugia was luxury 
to what we found at Orvieto, and it was 
no longer May but December, when it is 
nearly as cold north of Rome as with us ; 
and Romewasdrawinguswith hermighty 
magnet. So, one wintry morning, soon 
after daybreak, we set out in a close car- 
riage with four horses, wrapped as if we 
were going in a sleigh, with a scaldino 
(or little brazier) under our feet, for the 



[8 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



nearest railway station on our route, a 
nine hours' drive. Our way lay through 
the snow -covered hills and their leaf- 



less forest, and long after we had left Or- 
vieto behind again ami again a rise in the 
road would bring it full in sight on its 




base of tufa, girt by its walls, the Gothic I light, such as painters throw before the 
lines of the cathedral sharp against the chariot of Phoebus, refracted against the 
clear, brightening sky. At our last look ! pure aether, spread like a halo round the 
the sun was not up, but broad shafts of I threefold pinnacles : a moment more and 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



•9 



Orvieto was hidden behind a higher hill, 
not to be seen again. All day we drove 
among the snow-bound hills and woods, 
past the Lake of Bolscna in its forbid- 
ding beauty; past small valleys full of 
naked fruit trees and shivering olives, 
which must be nooks of loveliness in 
spring; past defiant little towns aloft on 
their islands of tufa, like Bagnorea with 
its single slender bell-tower; past Mon- 
tefiascone with its good old story about 
Cardinal Fugger and the native wine. 
We stopped to lunch at Viterbo, a town 
more closely connected with the history 
of the Papacy than any except Rome 
itself, and full of legends and romantic 
associations: it is dirty and dilapidated, 
and has great need of all its memories. 
Being but eight miles from Montefias- 
cone, we called for a bottle of the fatal 
Est, which we had tasted once at Augs- 
burg, where the host of the Three Moors 
has it in his cellar, in honor perhaps of 
the departed Fugger family, whose pal- 
ace has become his hotel : there we had 
found it delicious — a wine as sweet as 
cordial, with a soul of fire and a pene- 
trating but delicate flavor of its own — 
how different from the thin, sour stuff 
they brought us in the long -necked, 
straw- covered flask, nothing to attest 
its relationship to the generous juice 
at the Three Moors except the singular, 
unique flavor! After this little disap- 
pointment we left Viterbo, and drove on 
through the same sort of scenery, which 
seemed to grow more and more beautiful 
in the rosy light of the sinking sun. But 
it is hard to tell, for nothing makes a 
journey so beautiful as to know that 
Rome is the goal. As the last rays were 
flushing the hill-tops we came in sight 
of Orte, with its irregular lines of build- 
ing clinging to the sides of its precipitous 
cliff in such eyrie-wise that it is difficult 
to say what is house and what is rock, 
and whether the arched passages with 
which it is pierced are masonry or natural 
grottoes ; and there was the Tiber — al- 
ready the yellow Tiber — winding through 
the valley as far as eye could follow. 
Here we waited for the train, which was 
ten minutes late, and tried to make up 
for lost time by leaving our luggage, all 



duly marked and ready, standing on the 
track. We soon began to greet familiar 
sites as we flitted by : the last we made 




THE T1UEK, KKOM ORTE. 

out plainly was Borghetto, a handful of 
houses, with a ruined castle keeping watch 
on a hill hard by : then twilight gather- 
ed, and we strained our eyes in vain for 



FOLLOWING TLIE TLB EL'. 



the earliest glimpse of Mount Soracte, \ Romano, the outposts of our excursions, 
and night came down before we could i the farm-towers we knew by name, the 
descry the first landmarks of the Agio ! farthest fragments of the aqueducts. 




But it was not so obscure that we could 
not discern the Tiber between his low 
banks showing us the way, the lights 
quivering in the Anio as the train rush- 



ed over the bridge ; and when at length 
we saw against the clear night-sky a 
great dark barrier stretching right and 
left, we knew that the walls of Rome 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



21 



were once more before us : in a moment 
we had glided through with slackening 
speed, and her embrace enfolded us 



The Tiber, winding as it oes like a 
great artery through the heart of Rome, 
is seldom long either out of sight or 
mind. One constantly comes upon it 




in the most unexpected manner, for 
there is no river front to the city. There 
is a wide open space on the Ripetta — a 



street which runs from the Piazza del 
Popolo, at the head of the foreign quar- 
ter, to remoter parts — where a broad 



roil OWING THE TIBER. 




THE CASTLE OF ST. AISGELO. 



flight of marble steps descends to the 
level of the flood, and a ferry crosses to 
the opposite bank : looking over at the 
trees and fields, it is like the open coun- 
try, yet beyond are St. Peter's and the 
Vatican, and the whole of what is known 
as the Leonine City. But one cannot 
follow the Tiber through the streets of 
Rome as one may the Seine in Paris: in 
the thickly-built quarters the houses back 
upon the stream and its yellow waves 
wash their foundations, working wrath 
and woe from time to time, as those who 
were there in the winter of 1870 will rec- 
ollect. Sometimes it is lost to sight for 
half a mile together, unless one catches 
a glimpse of it through the carriage-way 
of a palace. From the wharf of the Ri- 
petta it disappears until you come upon 
it again at the bridge of St. Angelo, the 
JEWan bridge of ancient Rome, which 
is the most direct passage from the fash- 
ionable and foreign quarter to the Tras- 
tevere. It must be confessed that the idle 
sense of mere pleasure generally super- 
sedes recollection and association after 
one's first astonishment to find one's self 
among the historic places subsides; yet 
how often, as our horses' hoofs rang on 
the slippery stones, my thoughts went 
suddenly back to the scene when Saint 



Gregory passed over, chanting litanies, 
at the head of the whole populace, who 
formed one vast penitential procession, 
and saw the avenging angel alight on 
the mausoleum of Adrian and sheath his 
sword in sign that the plague was stayed; 
or to that terrible day when the ferocious 
mercenaries of the Constable de Bour- 
bon and the wretched inhabitants giv- 
en over to sack and slaughter swarmed 
across together, butchering and butcher- 
ed, while the troops in the castle hurled 
down what was left of its classic statues 
upon the heads of friend and foe, and 
the Tiber was turned to blood ! 

From the bridge of St. Angelo the river 
is lost again for a long distance, although 
one can make one's way to it at various 
points — where at low water the submerged 
piers of the Pons Triumphalis are to be 
seen, where the Ponte Sisto leads to the 
foot of the Janiculum Hill, and on the 
opposite bank the orange-groves of the 
Farnesina palace hang their golden fruit 
and dusky foliage over the long garden- 
wall upon the river — until we come to 
the Ponte Quatro Capi (Bridge of the 
Four Heads) and the island of the Tiber. 
This is said to have been formed in the 
kingly period by the accumulation of a 
harvest cast into the stream a little way 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
- 



-3 




ISLAND OK THE TIBER. 



above, which the current could not sweep 
away : it made a nucleus for alluvial de- 
posit, and the island gradually arose. 
Several hundred years afterward it was 
built into the form of a ship, as bridges 
and wharves are built, with a temple in 
the midst, and a tall obelisk set up in 
guise of its mast. In mediaeval days a 
church replaced the heathen fane, and 
now it stands between its two bridges, a 
huddle of houses, terraces and gardens, 
whence one looks down on the fine mass 
of the Ponte Rotto (Broken Bridge), whose 
shattered arches pause in mid -stream, 
and across to the low arch of the Cloaca 
Maxima and the exquisite little circular 
temple of Vesta. From here down, the 
river is in full view from either side until 
it passes beyond the walls near the Monte 
Testaccio — on one side the Ripa Grande 
(Great Bank or Wharf), a long series of 
quays, on the other the Marmorata or 
marble landing, where the ships from 
the quarries unload. Here, on each side, 
all sorts of small craft lie moored, not 
betokening a very extensive commerce 
from their size and shape, but quaint 
and oddly rigged, making a very good 
tore- or back-ground, according as one 
looks at the picture. The Marmorata is 
at the foot of the Aventine, the most 



lonely and unvisited of the Seven Hills. 
From among the vegetable-gardens and 
cypress-groves which clothe its long flank 
rise large, formless piles, whose founda- 
tions are as old as the Eternal City, and 
whose superstructures are the wreck of 
temples of the kingly and republican pe- 
riods, and palaces and villas of impe- 
rial times,* and haughty feudal abodes, 
only to be distinguished from one an- 
other by the antiquary amid their indis- 
criminate ruin and the tangle of wild- 
briers and fern, ivy and trailers with 
which thev are overgrown. On the sum- 




CUPOLA OP ST. PR IKK S 



^4 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 




THE PINCIO, FROM THE VII. I .A BORGHESE. 



mit no trace of ancient Rome is to be 
seen. There are no dwellings of men 
on this deserted ground : a few small 
and very early Christian churches have 
replaced the temples which once stood 
here, to be in their turn neglected and 
forsaken : they stand forlornly apart, 
.separated by vineyards and high blank 
•vails. On the brow of the hill is the 
esplanade of a modern fort, and within 
ts quiet precincts are the church and 
priory of the Knights of Malta — nothing 
but a chapel and small villa as abandon- 
ed as the rest. After toiling up a steep 
and narrow lane between two walls, our 
carriage stopped at a solid wooden gate- 
way, and the coachman told us to get 
out and look through the keyhole. We 
were aghast, but he insisted, laughing 
and nodding ; so we pocketed our pride 
and peeped. Through an overarching 
vista of dark foliage was seen, white and 
golden in a blaze of sunshine, the cupola 
of St. Peter's, which is at the farthest end 
of the city, two miles at the least as the 
crow flies. When the gate was opened 
we entered a sweet little garden full of 
violets, traversed by an alley of old ilex 
trees, through which appeared the noble 
dome, and which led from the gate to a 
terrace overhanging the Tiber — I will not 
venture to guess how far below — more 
like two than one hundred feet ; perhaps 
still farther. On the edge of the terrace 
was an arbor, and here we sank down 
enchanted, to drink in the view of the 
city, which spread out under our eyes as 



we had never seen it from any other 
point. But the custodino's wife urged 
us to come into the Priorato and see the 
view from the upper story. We follow- 
ed her, reluctant to leave the sunshine 
and soft air, up a stiff winding staircase, 
through large, dark, chilly, long-closed 
apartments, until we reached the top, 
where there was a great square room oc- 
cupying the whole floor. She flung open 
the windows, and never did such a pan- 
orama meet my eyes. There were win- 
dows on every side: to the north, one 
looked across the city to St. Peter's, the 
Vatican, the Castle of St. Angelo, the 
Tiber with its great bends and many 
bridges, and to lonely, far-away Soracte ; 
westward, on the other side of the river, 
rose the Janiculum with its close-wedged 
houses, grade on grade, and on its sum- 
mit the church of San Pietro in Montorio 
and the flashing cataract of the Acqua 
Paola fountain, the stone-pines of the 
Villa Doha cresting the ridge above ; 
eastward, the Palatine, a world of ruins 
in a world of gardens, lay between us 
and the Coliseum, and over them and 
the wall, the aqueducts, the plain, the eye 
ranged to the snow-capped Sabine Hills, 
on whose many-colored declivities tiny 
white towns were dotted like browsing 
sheep ; southward, we gazed down upon 
the Pyramid of Cestius, upon the beautiful 
Protestant cemetery with its white monu- 
ments and dark cypresses where lie Shel- 
ley and Keats, upon the stately Porta San 
Paolo, a great mediaeval gateway flanked 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



=5 



with towers, and beyond, the Campagna, 
purple, violet, ultramarine, oceanic, roll- 
ing out toward the Alban Hills, which 
glittered with snow, rising sharply like 
island-peaks and sloping down like prom- 
ontories into the plain ; and over all the 
sun and sky and shadows of Italy. 

The prospect from the Priorato sur- 
passes anything in Rome — even the won- 
derful view from the Janiculum, even the 
enchanting outlook from the Pincian Hill. 
But the last was at our very doors : we 
could go thither in the morning to watch 
the white mist curl up from the valleys 
and hang about the mountain-brows, and 
at noon, when even in January the cool 
avenues and splashing fountains were 
grateful, and at sunset, when the city lay 
before us steeped in splendor. That was 
the view of our daily walks — the beloved 
view of which one thinks most often and 
fondly in remembering Rome. 

But it is in riding that one grows to feel 
most familiar with the Tiber and all his 
Roman children, whether it be strolling 
somewhat sulkily in a line with his banks 
by the Via Flaminia or the Via Cassia, 
impatient to get away from their stones 
and dust to the soft, springing turf; or 
hailing him from afar as a guide after 
losing one's self in the endless undula- 
tions of the open country ; or cantering 
over daffodil - sheeted meadows beside 
the Anio at the foot of the grassy heights 
on which Antcmnae stood ; or threading 
one's way doubtfully among the ravines 
which intersect the course of the little 
C rem era as one 
goes to Veii. The 
last is a most beau- 
tiful and interest- 
ing expedition, for, 
what with the dis- 
tance — more than 
twelve miles — and 
the difficulty of 
finding the way, it 
is quite an enter- 
prise. As one turns 
his horse's head 
away from the riv- 
er, off the high- 
road, to the high 
grassy flats, the 



whole Campagna seems to lie before one 
like a vast table-land, with nothing be- 
tween one's self and Soracte as he lifts 
his heavy shoulder from the plain— not 
half hidden by intervening mountains, 
as from some points of view, but majes- 
tic and isolated, thirty miles away to the 
north. But here, as in every other part 
of the Campagna, one cannot go far with- 
out finding hillocks and hollows, long 
steep slopes and sudden little dells, and, 
stranger still, unsuspected tracts of wood- 
land, for the general effect of the Roman 
landscape is quite treeless. So there is 
a few miles' gallop across the trackless 
turf, sometimes asking the way of a soli- 
tary shepherd, who looms up against the 
sky like a tower, sometimes following it 
by faint landmarks, few and far between, 
of which we have been told, and hard to 
find in that waste, until we pass a curi- 
ous little patriarchal abode shaped like 
a wigwam, where, in the midst of these 
wide pastures dwells a herdsman sur- 
rounded by his family, his cattle, his dogs, 
his goats and his fowls — the beautiful 
animals of the Campagna, long-haired, 
soft-eyed, rich-colored, like the human 
children of the soil. Then we strike the 
Cremera, and exploring begins among 
its rocky gullies, up and down which 
the spirited, sure-footed horses scramble 
like chamois. Thick woods of cork-oak 
clothe their sides, and copses of a decid- 
uous tree which I never saw in its summer 
dress of green, but which keeps its dead 
leaves all through the winter, a full suit 




26 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 




VK1I, FROM T1IK CAMPAGNA. 



of soft, pale brown contrasting with the 
dark evergreens. Among these woods 
grow all the wild-flowers of the long Ro- 
man spring from January to May — flow- 
ers that I never saw in bloom at the 
same time anywhere else. On banks 
overcanopied by faded boughs nodded 
myriads of snowdrops ; farther on we 
held our horses' heads well up as they 
slipped, almost sitting, down the damp 
rocky clefts of a gorge whose sides were 
purple with violets, mingling their de- 
licious odor, the sweetest and most sen- 
timental of perfumes, with the fresh, ge-. 
ranium-like scent of the cyclamen, which 
here and there flung back its delicate 
pinkish petals like one amazed: then 
came acres of anemones — not our pale 
wind -shaken flower, but brave asters 
of half a dozen superb kinds. Up and 
down these passes we forced our way 
through interlacing branches, which 
drooped too low, until we had crossed 
the ridges on either side the Cremera, 
and gained the valley at the head of 
which is Isola Farnese, the rock-fort- 
ress supposed to occupy the site of the 
citadel of Etruscan Vcii. It is not really 
an island, in spite of its name; only a 
bold peninsula, round whose base two 
rivulets flow and nearly meet. It is call- 



ed a village, and so it is, with quite a 
population, but the great courtyard of 
the fifteenth-century castle contains them 
all, and the huts, pig-pens, kennels and 
coops which they seem to inhabit in- 
discriminately. Except where the bluff 
overlooks the valley, everything is closed 
and shut in by rocks and gorges, through 
one of which a lovely waterfall drips 
from a covert of boughs and shrubbery 
and wreathing ferns and creepers into a 
little stream, which with musical clam- 
or rushes at a picturesque old mill : 
through another the road from the 
castle passes through a narrow issue to 
the outer world. And this stranded and 
shipwrecked fortress in the midst of so 
wild a scene is all that exists to mark 
where Veii stood, the powerful city which 
kept Rome at bay for ten years, and fell 
at length by stratagem ! Its site was for- 
gotten for nearly two thousand years, but 
in this century the discovery of some 
tombs revealed the secret. 

The scenery differs entirely on different 
sides of Rome. Here there is not a ruin, 
not a vestige, except a few low heaps of 
stone- or brickwork hidden by weeds : 
on the other, toward Tivoli, much of the 
beauty is due to the work of man — the 
stately remnants of ancient aqueduct, 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



27 



temple and tomb ; the tall square towers 
of feudal barons, round which cluster 
low farm-buildings scarcely less old and 
solid ; the vast, gloomy grottoes of Cer- 
bara, whi< h look like the underground 
palace of a bygone race, but which are 
the tufa-quarries of classic times ; the 
ruined baths of Zenobia, where the rush- 
ing milky waters of the Aquae Albulae 
fill the air with sulphurous fumes ; and, 
as a climax, the Villa of Hadrian, less 
a country-place than a who'e region, a 
town -in -country, with palace, temples, 
circus, theatres, baths amidst a tract of 
garden and pleasure-ground ten miles in 
circumference. Even when one is famil- 
iar with the enormous height and bulk 
of the Coliseum or the Baths of Cara- 
calla, the extent of the ruins of Hadrian's 
Villa is overwhelming. Numerous frag- 
ments are still standing, graceful and 
elegant, but a vast many more are buried 
deep under turf and violets and fern: 
large cypresses and ilexes have struck 
root among their stones, and they form 
artificial hills and vales and great wide 
plateaus covered with herbage and shrub- 
bery, hardly to be distinguished from the 
natural accidents of the land. The soli- 
tude is as immense as the space. After 



leaving our carriage we wandered about 
for hours, sometimes lying in the sun- 
shine at the edge of a great grassy ter- 
race which commands the Campagna 
and the Agro Romano — beyond whose 
limits we had come — to where, like a 
little bell, St. Peter's dome hung faint 
and blue upon the horizon ; sometimes 
exploring the innumerable porticoes and 
galleries, and replacing in fancy the Ve- 
nus de Medici, the Dancing Faun, and 
all the other shapes of beauty which 
once occupied these ravished pedestals 
and niches; sometimes rambling about 
the flowery fields, and up and down 
among the hillocks and dells, meeting 
no one, until at length, when complete- 
ly bewildered and lost, we fell in with a 
rustic belonging to the estate, who guided 
us back. We left the place with the 
sense of having been in a separate realm, 
another country, belonging to another 
age. The whole of that visit to Tivoli 
was like a dream. The sun was sinking 
when we left the precincts of the villa, 
and twilight stole upon us, wrapping all 
the landscape on which we looked back 
in softer folds of shade, and resolving its 
features into large, calm masses, as the 
horses labored up the narrow, stony road 




2S 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 




CASTLE AT OSTIA. 



into a mysterious wood of gigantic olives, 
gnarled, twisted and rent as no other tree 
could be and live. The scene was wild 
and weird in the dying light, and it grew 
almost savage as we wound upward 
among the robber-haunted hills. Night 
had fallen before we reached the moun- 
tain-town. Our coachman dashed through 
the dark slits of streets, where it seemed 
as if our wheels must strike the houses 
on each side, cracking his whip and 
jingling the bells of the harness. Under 
black archways sat groups of peasants, 
their swart visages lit up from below by 
the glow of a brazier, while a flaring torch 
stuck through a ring overhead threw 
fierce lights and shadows across the 
scene. Sharp cries and shouts like mal- 
edictions rose as we passed, and as we 
turned into the little square on which the 
inn stands we wondered in what sort of 
den we should have to lodge. We fol- 
lowed our host of the little Albergo dclla 
Regnia up the steep stone staircase with 
many misgivings : he flung open a door, 
and we beheld a carpeted room, all fur- 
nished and hung with pink chintz cov- 
ered with cupids and garlands. There 
were sofas, low arm-chairs, a writing- 
table with appurtenances, a tea-table with 



snowy linen and a hissing brass tea-ket- 
tle. Opening from this were two little 
white nests of bed-rooms, with tin bath- 
tubs and an abundance of towels. We 
could not believe our eyes : here were 
English comfort and French taste. Were 
we in May Fair or the Rue de Rivoli ? 
Or was it a fairy-tale ? 

The fairy-tale went on next day, when, 
after wending our way through the dirty, 
crooked little streets, we crossed a court- 
yard and descended a long subterranean 
stairway to emerge on a magnificent ter- 
race with a heavy marble balustrade, 
whence flights of steps led down to low- 
er grades, amid statues, urns, vases, foun- 
tains, reservoirs, camellias in bloom min- 
gled with laurel and myrtle and laurus- 
tinums covered with creamy flowers, cy- 
presses tall as cathedral spires, ilex av- 
enues, and broad straight walks between 
huge walls of box : the whole space was 
filled with the song of nightingales, the 
tinkle of falling water, with whiffs of aro- 
matic shrubs and the breath of hidden 
roses and violets: — a princely garden, a 
royal pleasaunce, but in exquisite disor- 
der and neglect ; the shrubbery too thick 
and straggling, the flowers straying be- 
yond their rightful boundaries, the statues 



FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 



29 



stained and moss-grown, the balusters 
entangled in clinging luxuriance, the 
fountains dripping through fern and 
maiden-hair— Nature supreme, as one 
always sees her in this land of Art. It 
was the Villa d'Este, famous these three 
hundred years for its fountains and cy- 
presses. Nor did the wonder cease when 
we forsook this enchanting spot for the 
mountain - road which overhangs the 
great ravine. Opposite, backed by moun- 
tains, rose the crags topped by the clus- 
tering town and all its towers, arches, 
niches, battlements, bridges, long lines 
of classic ruins, and on the edge of the 
abyss the perfect little temple of the 
Sibyl ; rushing down from everywhere 
the waterfalls, one great column plung- 
ing at the head of the gorge, and count- 
less frolic streams, the cascatelle, leaping 
and dancing from rock to rock through 
mist and rainbow and extravagance of 
emerald moss and herbage, down among 
sea-green, silvery olives, finally sliding 
away, between softer foliage and verdure, 
through the valley into the plain — the im- 
mense azure plain, with its grand sym- 
phonic harmonies of form and color. O 
land of dreams fulfilled, of satisfied long- 
ing ! when across these thousands of miles 
I recall your entrancing charm, your un- 
imaginable beauty, I sometimes wonder 
if you were not a dream, if you have any 
place in this real existence, this lower 
earth : are you still delighting other eyes 
with the rapture of your loveliness, or 
were you only an illusion, a vision, which 
vanishes like the glow of sunset or "gold- 
en exhalations of the dawn " ? 

The Campagna has one more aspect, 
different from all the rest, where the Ti- 
ber, weary with his long wanderings, 
rolls lazily to the sea. It is a dreary 
waste of swamp and sandhill and scrub 
growth, but with a forlorn beauty of its 
own, and the beauty of color, never ab- 
sent in Italy. The tall, coarse grass and 



reeds pass through a series of vivid tones, 
culminating in tawny gold and deep 
orange, against which the silver-fretted 
violet blue-green of the Mediterranean 
assumes a magical splendor. Small, 




HEAD OF THE 1 RAJAN CANAL, NEAK OSTIA. 

shaggy buffaloes with ferocious eyes, and 
sometimes a peasant as wild-looking as 
they, are the only inhabitants of this wil- 
derness. The machicolated towers ©>f 
Castel Fusano among its grand stone- 
pines stand up from the marshes, and 
farther seaward another castle with a 
single pine; but they only enhance the 
surrounding loneliness. Ostia, the an- 
cient port, which sea and river have both 
deserted, is now a city of the dead, a 
Pompeii above ground, whose avenues 
of tombs lead to streets of human dwell- 
ings more desolate still. It is no longer 
by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that 
one can reach the sea : the way was 
choked by sand and silt seventeen cen- 
turies ago, and Trajan caused the canal 
to be made which bears his name ; and 
this is still the outlet from Rome to the 
Mediterranean, while the river expires 
among the pestilential marshes. 



Up the Thames 



UP THE THAMES 



FIRST PAPER. 




^-v^a 



$$55?r4- ^>i?0S*$S^* ' 



OLD WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. 



TO the westward drift alike fashion, 
history and empire. The west end 
of cities corresponds to the west end of 
chronology. It is the forward end, the 
eventful end — the end of gayety, change, 
life, movement. The eastern end — for 
3 



even this spherical perch of ours must 
have a beginning somewhere — is that 
which melts into the stagnant past, as 
into, say, the yellow blankness of the 
Babylonian plains and the swamps of 
Siam or the Isle of Dogs. 

33 



34 



UP THE THAMES. 



So the cxcursionizing visitor in Lon- 
don, having performed the melancholy 
duty of groping through the cobwebs 
and fungi of the great wine-vaults and 
the other wonders of the dock - region — 
Dore's illustrations of which are scarce 
surpassed in unearthly gloom by those 
of his Wandering Jew — is not apt to do 




HATTERSEA RED HOUSE. 

more in that direction than take a hasty 
glance at Greenwich, where the pension- 
ers used to be, and the telescopes and 
the whitebait still are. Beyond and be- 
low that all is blank ; for, though a jaunt 
to Margate is a thing of joy to thousands 
of Londoners, "nobody" lives there or 
ever did. Our knowledge of, or interest 
in, the place we owe almost exclusively 
to the Rev. Sydney's account of the "re- 
ligious hoy that sets off every week for 
Margate," and Elia'smore sympathizing 
sketch of a trip thither by a more rapid 
and less saintly conveyance. The es- 
tuary of the Thames is almost as poor a 
cover for the explorer to draw as the es- 
tuary of the Delaware. So he gives the 
wind to the herring country over the way, 
and turns his nose up stream. Above 
Westminster Bridge, starting from the 
Houses of Parliament, he looks for the 
haunts of the hard fighters and hard 
thinkers, past and present, of England, 
and for her most characteristic charms 
of landscape, natural and artificial. 

Our starting-point, though above the 
limits of the city proper, is five, six or 
seven — no one can tell exactly how many 
— miles below the western edge of the 
metropolis. The ancient city, with three 



hundred thousand inhabitants more than 
two centuries ago, and hardly a hundred 
thousand to-day, is but the dingy nucleus 
of a vast nebula of brick, that differs 
from a comet in constantly expanding 
and never contracting. As a sample of 
its progress, the opening, in the ten years 
from 1 86 1 to 1 871, of six hundred and 
thirty-five miles of new streets will 
serve. Nine or ten thousand houses 
are annually erected — twice as 
many as are in the same time add- 
ed to the most rapidly- growing 
American city. About four mil- 
lions of souls occupy an area of 
one hundred and thirty-one square 
miles, this being still but a corner 
of the space — five hundred and 
seventy-six — included within the 
beats of the metropolitan police. 
London has thus gathered to itself 
not only home provinces, but out- 
lying colonies. More populous 
than Rome ever was, her commis- 
sariat gives her none of the worry that 
so complicated the politics of her pro- 
totype. Seventy miles of beeves, ten 
abreast, stalk calmly every year into her 
capacious maw. And it cries out for 
more, and will not be appeased with 
anything short of a corresponding trib- 
ute of sheep, pigs, poultry, etc. by way 
of entremets. Statistics like these pass 
from the arithmetical into the poetic, and 
approach the sublime. Hecatombs do 
capital duty in the old epics, but what 
are hecatombs to such nations of live- 
stock as these ? An army, said Napo- 
leon or Wellington, or both, travels on 
its belly. London equals in numbers 
and exceeds in consumption forty armies 
larger than either of these generals had 
at Waterloo. Fancy the commensurate 
receptacle ! The mass oppresses the 
imagination. Let us get from under it. 

Making a day's excursion from a place 
which, at the travel-rate of half a century 
ago, it takes something like a day's jour- 
ney to traverse, seems akin to the idea 
of taking a week's trip from the United 
States, since it is easy to run across the 
United States in a week. A great part 
of the time is consumed in attaining the 
point proper of departure. The most 



UP THE THAMES. 



35 




CHELSEA, FROM THE RIVER. 



determined sight-seer is apt to be blase 
before reaching the rural part of his tour, 
to such a degree has the earth-hunger of 
Britain's capital, typical in that attribute, 
as in many others, of Britain itself, swal- 
lowed the adjacent territory. Village af- 
ter village and parish upon parish has 
been absorbed. We find them in every 
stage of assimilation, digested into wards 
or crude as districts. 

A century or two ago, according to the 
doggerel of the time, when the lord may- 
or and aldermen set out on their annual 
hunting excursion, their route lay "from 
Cheapside down by Fenchurch street, 
and so to Aldgate Pump," and soon 
found themselves, despite the tardy lo- 
comotion of their fat Flemish horses, 
among the fields. From where we set 
forth, two miles up the river, we may, 
the eye following the current, mark where 
the magnificent Thames Embankment 
carries elegance, atmosphere and health 
into the noisome tide-marshes that skirt- 
ed their haunts. 

On Westminster Bridge, the second of 
the name constructed within a century 
and a quarter, we stand, as on the Bridge 
of Sighs, " a palace and a prison on each 
hand." The Houses of Parliament, ex- 
celling in cost and elaboration most pal- 
aces, look down upon one of Mr. Bull's 



recently abandoned pets, the Millbank 
Penitentiary, situated on the same (or 
north) side of the Thames. Over the 
way, Lambeth, the ancient residence 
of the archbishops of Canterbury, is both 
palace and prison. Replete with mem- 
ories of Cardinal Pole, Laud, Juxon, Til- 
lotson and their successors, that part of 
its irregular facade which is first sought 




SIR THOMAS MORE'S MONUMENT. 



36 



UP THE THAMES. 





CHELSEA CHURCH. 



by the eye of the stranger is the Lollards' 
Tower, wherein the followers of Wycliffe 
tasted the first fruits on English soil of 
religious persecution. 

Vauxhall Gardens have passed away 
with Sir Roger de Coverley, and the su- 
perior taste which improved them out 
of existence manifested itself in a fash- 
ionable pigeon-shooting resort dubbed 
the Red House. 

Glancing to the northern shore again, 
Chelsea Hospital comes into view, a 
present which England owes, as she does 
her Indian empire, her American colo- 
nies, her navy, St. Paul's, the best of her 
art-treasures, and so many other acquisi- 
tions of power and culture, to the ma- 







SIR HANS SLOANE'S MONUMENT. 



ligned Stuarts. The story that Nell 
Gwynne has the credit of having sug- 
gested the creation of this national retreat 
for the broken soldier is far from having 
gained universal acceptance. Yet the 
existence of the tradition is as compli- 
mentary to her as would be its truth. It 
proves what a character for that charity 
which covereth a multitude of sins the 
active benevolence of the gay comedienne 
had earned among the people. The Han- 
overian ladies who came "for all your 
goots " have never been accused of any 
such freak. 

The shadows of the famous dead be- 
gin to thicken around us with the bend- 
ing trees — of great men, not as they 
mingled in the turmoil of court and 
council, but as they strolled in their gar- 
dens, labored in the study, or went, like 
common people, through the daily round 
of domestic life. Within a very circum- 
scribed space lay the abodes of Pym, 
Shaftesbury, Locke, Addison, Steele, 
Swift and Atterbury. The extinct ham- 
let of Little Chelsea was thus gilded by 
the greater lights of the Augustan age 
of British literature. Swift for a time 
had for his next neighbor over the way 
his intriguing brother of the cloth, and 
got on with him much more smoothly 
and pleasantly than was his wont with 
others. Had they agreed better they 
would doubtless have been worse friends. 

Far back of this circle, in point of time, 
flourished on the same spot the author 
of Utopia, Sir Thomas More, handed 



UP THE THAMES. 



37 





X I 



n£3Sss»SE 




sacs** --—-—_ 

BATfERSEA IiRIDGE, 



down to us by that enigma among phi- 
losophers and divines, Erasmus, as every 
way a model man. Other accounts go 
to justify this character. To himself, his 
long and placid life must have appeared 
a perfect success, and he may well have 
deemed himself to be lapsing dreamily 
into the bliss of his imaginary republic 
until rudely awakened by the axe of the 
tyrant whom in the epitaph of his own 
composition in the heyday of his pros- 
perity he styles the "best of princes." 
Readers of this inscription, which stands 
in faultless Latin on his monument in 
Chelsea church, may note, after the pas- 
sage which proclaims the writer and de- 
ceased a stern foe to thieves and mur- 
derers, a blank space which was origin- 
ally filled with "heretics," the identical 
class of malefactors for belonging to 
which he was himself, within three years, 
brought to the block by the best of 
princes. A keen helmsman it must have 
taken to steer in the wake of bluff Harry. 
The Vicar of Bray was right in claiming 
to be the only consistent man of his day. 

A different style of philosopher, one 
of our modern evangelists of the prac- 
tical, Sir Hans Sloane, unites with More 
in illustrating Chelsea. His works have 
not followed him, but still speak in mon- 
uments which cannot lie — in the dispen- 
sary system for the relief of the poor, 
in broad and beautiful Botanic Gardens, 
and in the British Museum, whereof his 
bequest was the nucleus. 

The West End, as we follow the river, 
has become the south end, and that in its 



most aggravated shape we have on the 
south bank. The majesty of the past 
gives place to the might of modern Eng- 
land in the very unsavory guise of the 
pariahs of the factory tribe. From mon- 
umental chimneys gin, vitriol and soap 
insult the welkin with their surplus fumes. 
It may be a question whether the most 
elegant of English political writers, the 
site of whose villa and the resting-place 
of whose remains is among them, would 
altogether enjoy such evidences of the 
prosperity of the kingdom whose welfare 
he pursued through paths so tortuous and 
yet illumined by so much genius. He 
— and certainly his friend Pope — might 
scorn such " meaner things." The states- 
man and the poet would have been loath 
to accept the soapboiler as a colaborei 




MONUMENT TO EOLINGUROKE. 



38 



UP THE THAMES. 




' UX 



in the cause of national elevation, al- 
though manufactures are at once the 
source and the expression of wealth, the 
familiar ally of statesmanship and poesy. 
"The first king was a fortunate soldier," 
and his workshop, the battlefield, is less 
pleasant to look upon than the foulest 
of factories. 

All this, however, does not lessen our 
anxiety to leave behind these homes of 
progress and get into the unprogressive 
country. It is not easy to keep out of 
the way of growing London. It almost 
visibly follows us up the river. In fact, 
as we skim the currentless surface of the 
placid and canal-like stream, where gar- 
den and grove more and more exclude 




BOWLING-GREEN 1 1« >USE. 



the town, it has stolen a march upon us 
— flanked us, so to speak, on the right 
or north, and taken a short cut across a 
semicircular bend of the Thames, miles 
in advance to Hammersmith and beyond. 
Two miles' sail from the metropolis will 
thus bring us back into the midst of it. 
But till then we shall enjoy the suburb- 
and-villa sensation supplied by the sce- 
nery near Putney and Fulham. 

Abundance of celebrities here beset 
us. The chief of them in modern eyes 
are Gibbon, who was born, and the 
younger Pitt, who died, at Putney. It 
was not among these tranquil folds and 
meadows that "the lord of irony, that 
master -spell," formed the plan of his 
great history. Concep- 
tions of war and revo- 
lution seem here wholly 
forced and unnatural 
ideas. At first thought, 
they would appear 
equally so amid the 
ruins of the Coliseum, 
where, as he tells us, 
the design first occur- 
red to him. But there 
the remains of the em- 
pire whose epitaph he 
was to write lay broad 
and clear around him. 



' 



nt 



Kl 



UP THE THAMES. 



39 



To disentangle from the obscure and in- 
volved records of twelve centuries of bar- 
barism the reasons why so much and so 
little of it survive, was a task that one is 
surprised should have been left to a wan- 
derer from the British Islands. It is a 
task thoroughly performed by him. His 
work has not been mentionably improved 
by any of the corrections and expansions 
that have been essayed : the author's 
edition remains the best. It may be 
pronounced not merely the only history 
of the vast period it covers, but the only 
compendious and perspicuous history of 
any considerable portion of it. It stands 
out in European literature from a host 
of monographs, chronicles and memoirs, 
many of them more brilliant and exhaust- 
ive, like one of Raphael's canvases in a 



gallery of Flemish cabinet pictures. Gib- 
bon and Clarendon may almost be term- 
ed the only English historians. Hume and 
Robertson were Scotch ; Macaulay's frag- 
ment is a clever partisan pamphlet, not a 
history ; Froude, the fashion of the hour, 
is already on the wane, as befits a chron- 
icler whose passion is for paradox rather 
than for truth. In one or another respect 
each of these is Gibbon's superior in style. 
His method of expression is rhetorical 
and involved to the last degree. And 
yet it does not tire the reader. Discov- 
ering the sense soon ceases to be an 
effort, with such unfailing regularity does 
the meaning distill, drop by drop, from 
those convoluted sentences. The calm, 
clear, idiomatic flow of Hume, and the 
direct, precise, engine-like beat of Mac- 




aulay, are both technically preferable ; 
but the former would have put us to 
sleep before we got through a long reign 
of the Lower Empire, and the vigorous 
invective of the latter, pelting as with 
rock-crystal the ample material before 
him, would have palled upon us ere los- 
ing sight of the Antonines. 

Pitt, the "great young minister," a 
maker and not a writer of history, died 
at the Bowling-green House on January 
23, 1806, of an attack of Austerlitz. The 
courier who brought him the news of 
that battle brought him his death-war- 
rant : a French bullet could not have 
been more fatal. Napoleon had his re- 
venge for the disasters of the future. Pitt 
might have outlived him and died any- 
thing but an old man, but the satisfaction 



of witnessing Moscow and Waterloo was 
denied him. It would have been in his 
eyes the happy and natural close of the 
great drama, only the first two or three 
acts of which it was his to witness. It is 
impossible to repress a feeling of sym- 
pathy with the earnest and patriotic 
statesman, galled, baffled and beaten, 
compelled, while racked with bodily suf- 
fering, to face some of the mightiest foes 
at home and abroad that publicist had 
ever to encounter — the eloquence of Fox 
and Sheridan and the sword of Napoleon 
— laying down the chief power of the 
realm to die heartbroken in these se- 
cluded shades. 

Less secluded are they now than sev- 
enty years ago. Attracted by the com- 
paratively elevated situation and fine air 



40 



LT THE THAMES. 




g 



HORTICULTURAL GARDENS, CHISW1CK. 



of Putney Heath, many residents have 
sought it. It is now covered with villas, 
each boasting its own private demesne, 
if only large enough to accommodate a 
tree and some shrubs. It does not take 
a great mass of verdure to conceal a 
smallish house that stands back from the 
road, or to give to the whole row, square, 
crescent, terrace or walk a rural and re- 
tired effect. A passion for planting is 
common to the English everywhere, and 
especially does it manifest itself where 
all the conditions are so favorable as on 
the upper Thames. Trees are the nat- 
ural fringe of rivers in all countries. The 
watercourses of our great Western plains 
are mapped out by the only arboreal 
efforts Nature there seems capable of 
making. The streams of England, nat- 
urally a forest country, must always have 
been peculiarly rich in this decoration ; 
and had they not been the people would 
have made them so. The long stone 
quay is backed by its bordering grove, 
and towns and houses that throng down 
to the water are content, or rather prefer, 
to view it through such peepholes as the 
leaves may vouchsafe them. And then 
the turf, the glory of Britain, that show- 
er and shears, Heaven and man, vie in 
cherishing ! 

The basin of the Thames is nearly 
as fiat as the bottom of the ancient sea 
through which the chalk and clay that 



underlie it were slowly sifted down. 
Neither rocky cliff, breezy down, nor 
soaring mount has part in its scenery. 
What variety of outline the horizon seen 
from the river possesses is due to grove 
or facade. But all the variety these can 
give is there. The stream itself, so bar- 
ren in some of the ingredients of the 
picturesque, is as agreeably astonishing 
in the use it makes of what it has. The 
tide running to Teddington, twelve miles 
above London, and lock and dam nav- 
igation taking possession above that vil- 
lage, there is little current but that caused 
by the tide. The Thames, in other words, 
where not an estuary is a canal — we had 
almost said moat. It has neither rapids 
nor rocky islets. It labors under the 
fearfully depoetizing drawback of a tow- 
path. Racing shells, miraculously slim 
and crank, traverse with safety its rough- 
est bends. From Putney, where we now 
are, to Mortlake, four miles above, is the 
aquatic Newmarket of England, where 
the young thoroughbreds of Oxford and 
Cambridge yearly measure their mettle. 
Tufted islets — or "aits," as the local 
vernacular has it — varied in size and 
shape, divide the stream. Long reaches, 
with spire or palace faint and pearly 
in the distance, alternate with sweeping 
curves scolloped with billowy masses of 
foliage that bastion broad re-entering 
angles of tesselated lawn and meadow. 



UP THE THAMES. 



41 



Willow and elm, the most graceful of 
trees, luxuriant as such a habitat can 
make them, send streaks and masses 
of richest shadow beneath and beyond 
them. "Schools" of water-lilies star the 
clumps of reflected shade or blend with 
catches of sunlight brighter than them- 
selves. Vistas of water among the 
aits, and of velvet-green among 
the meadows, lead off here and 
there. Now we thread a bridge, 
modern and smart, or mediaeval 
and mossy, with a jumble of peak- 
ed arches diverse each from the 
other in shape and proportion. 
The cumbrous piers of these vet- 
erans repeat themselves in reflec- 
tion, substance and shadow cut 
apart by multiform ripples and 
swirls, that shift and start and 
interlace and pass hand in hand 
finally into the glassy sheet be- 
low, as they did when the Norman ma- 
sons set them first in motion. They built 
to last, those "Middle- Aged " artisans. 
Prodigal of material, and not given to 
venturesome experiments on the capa- 
cities of the arch, like those who design- 
ed the flat elliptical spans of Waterloo 
Bridge, their rule was to make security 
more secure. They multiplied spans, 
made them high and sharp, and set 
them up on piers and starlings that oc- 
cupied — and occupy yet where they have 
not been removed as impediments to the 
march of improvement — the greater part 
of the width of the river. From that por- 
tion of its course now under notice these 
old bridges have pretty well disappeared. 
Old London Bridge, the most consider- 
able of them, and an exaggeration of 
their most fantastic traits, gave place to 
its elegant successor half a century ago, 
after having sustained the rush of waters 
below and of a crowd of humanity, res- 
ident and locomotive, above, for five or 
six centuries. As we ascend the stream 
into regions less harried by the inexor- 
able invader, Progress, they grow more 
and more common. They enhance the 
difference in the character of the sce- 
nery. Chronology and landscape march 
together. As we are borne into the coun- 
try, we are led back, pari passu, into the 



past. It is taking a rustic tour into the 
Dark Ages by steam. 

Not that the absurd little steamers 
which infest these waters — the equation 
of hull, cabin, paddle-box and pipe re- 
duced to its lowest terms of a horizontal 
line and a vertical ditto erected on the cen- 



'^\S--. 




CHISWICK HOUSE. 



tre — can penetrate far into the antique. 
Their field grows narrower year by year 
with the wash of the expanding city. 
These boats will always be the gondo- 
las of London's Grand Canal, and all 
the more assuredly when the water-front 
shall have been transformed by the com- 
pletion of the long line of quay and es- 
planade now in progress ; but, as with 
their less prosaic congeners of Venice, 
their operations outside of the city limits 
will be restricted. 

It is in perfect keeping that the charms 
of the lush and mellow landscape that 
unrolls itself on either hand should be 
those of peace. Nearly two centuries 
and a half have passed since it was dis- 
turbed by battle. The fact helps us to 
realize the unspeakable blessing Eng- 
land's unassailablity by land is to her. 
Not only are her liberty and prosperity 
enabled to expand and establish them- 
selves without fear of disturbance from 
external forces, but they receive an im- 
pulse from the mere recognition of this 
fact derived from observation of the for- 
tunes of her neighbors under the con- 
trary condition. Her domestic politics, 
unlike those of the continental nations, 
are controlled only by domestic interests. 
The result is a practical and common- 
sense treatment of them, such as a mer- 



*3 



L'P THE THAMES. 




CHISWICK llor.sK 



chant makes of his imlividu.il affairs in 
the seclusion of his counting-house. The 
nation boutigutkre thus carries "shop" 
into her Parliament. Could a ditch im- 
passable to Von Moltke be drawn around 
poor France from Dunkirk to Nice, and 
kept impregnable even for a few decades, 

the world would witness a notable change 
in the steadiness o( her institutions and 
her industry. It is not a question purely 








IhHiAKll! s TOMB. 



ol tare, as we have usually been taught 
to consider it. Circumstance makes 

iaee, and 1 aee cannot rise wholly above 
circumstance. The Jutes and Saxons 
in their native seat are not distinguished 
above the other peoples of Christendom 
for intelligent and effective devotion to 
tree institutions. Many continental fam- 
ilies are more so. The Welsh and Scots, 
largely sharing the Celtic blood which is 
alleged to enfeeble the French, are in no 
way inferior to their English brethren in 
this regard, 

Peace at home tells, in three words, the 
main story of English freedom and might. 
B6ranger, lifting up his voice from the 
ruins of the First Empire, sings — 

J'ai \u la r.tix descendre sur la terre, 
Semanl de I'or, »les Reurs el des i-i>is. 

1 air eiait o.ihno. ct du Dieu do la Guerre 
Kilo ctoutV.iit les fbudres assoupis. 

With him it was an aspiration for peace. 
From the banks ot" the Thames, tin- 
smirched of blood and smoke and bloom- 
ing with everything that war can destroy, 
his aspiration would have been to peace, 
pervading in divinest aura the lovely 
scene. 

A realixation of this peculiar blessing 
is general among Englishmen. The tre- 
mendous lesson o\ the Conquest, eight 
hundred years old, is fresh with them 



UP THE THAMES. 



43 



yet. Thierry maintains that that invasion, 
in the existing domination of the Nor- 
man nobles in both houses of the na- 
tional legislature, and in their more and 
more absolute monopoly of the land, 
still weighs upon them. Be that as it 
may, the nobles arc at least an infinitesi- 
mally small numerical minority, compel- 
led not only to govern under a whole- 
some sense of that truth, but to recruit 
their numbers from the subject masses 
cooped up with them in the island and 
constituting the whole of its military and 
industrial strength. The commonalty 
have endured much for the sake of the 
tranquillity the palpable fruits of which 
surround them. And they will endure 
more, if necessary, as is evidenced by 
the slow progress and frequent backsets 
of liberalism, and the utter contempt 
into which republicanism has fallen. 
More reforms are to come, and will be 
exacted if not conceded freely ; but war 
to procure or to prevent them is the in- 
terest of neither the rulers nor the ruled. 
The faint whiff of villainous saltpetre 
that floats from the direction of Charles 
I.'s capital at Oxford along the skirmish- 
lines of Rupert and Essex as far down 
as Turnham Green is dilute with the 
breath of a dozen score of English 
springs. Yonder old elm may have 
closed around the pikehead of a Puritan 
or a Cavalier bullet, but it has smother- 
ed the disreputable intruder in two or 
three hundred tough and sturdy rings. 
The wall over which it hangs may have 



been similarly scarred without equal fac- 
ulty of healing by the first, or any, in- 
tention, but the hand of man has come 
to its relief, and difficult indeed is it now 
to find trace here of the melee when wood 
and water rang to the charge-shout — 

For God, for the laws, for the Church, for the cause ! 
For Charles, king of England., and Rupert of the 
Rhine I 

Wide and splendid gardens, filled with 
the botanic spoil of all the latitudes, over- 
spread the field of forgotten combat. So- 
cieties, commoners, and peers compete 
along the Thames, as in other parts of 
the island, in this charming strife. The 
duke of Devonshire, the owner of famous 
Chats worth, possesses a country-box call- 
ed Chiswick House, less noted for any 
association with the Cavendishes than as 
having witnessed the last hours of C. J. 
Eox and George Canning. Fox's death- 
bed, like his death -hour and his tomb, 
was very close to that of his great rival. 

Drop upon Fox's grave the tear, 
'Twill trickle to his rival's bier. 

You may read their epitaphs without 
turning on your heel, although a truth- 
ful one will not be written for either 
until we stand in the midst of such a 
quarter of a century as that wound up 
at Waterloo. All was exceptional then 
— acts and motives alike. The globe's 
polity, like its crust, is built of sediment- 
ary layers, filtered in calm, shot through 
by rare volcanic veins. When the sub- 
terranean fires shall break out again we 
may understand these men and their 




BARN ELMS HOUSE. 



44 



UP THE THAMES. 




KEW PALACE. 



contemporaries on both sides of the 
Channel. Exactly who and what was 
wrong may come clear when everything 
is once more muddle. Our mental optics 
must be adjusted to the turbid medium 
in which they moved. We cannot now 
determine how far the country for which 
both labored is the better or worse for 
their having lived. If at all the worse, 
wonderful indeed would have been her 
present exaltation, for it is difficult to 
conceive a finer spectacle of national 
thrift and ease. Certainly, there is much 
misery among the poor, rural and oppi- 
dan, throughout the kingdom, reduced 
as it has been of late years, and the in- 
equality in the distribution of property 
is greater than in any other Christian 
country ; but nothing of this is obtrusive 
to the voyager on the Thames. The 
lower classes appear under the not par- 
ticularly repulsive guise of gardeners, 
bargemen, drivers, park - keepers, etc. 
There are palaces, but none of them 
overshadowing save Windsor and Hamp- 
ton Court. Though the towns do not al- 
ways put their best foot foremost and dip 
it in the water, their slums rarely offend 
the eye. At this part of the river's course 
they are in great part new and bright, 
thanks to the growth of the great city. 
The rotund and genial clumps of trees 



that compose so much of the view shel- 
ter rich and poor alike, and the velvet 
sward is pressed as freely by brogan as by 
slipper. The wearers of both may chant 
as they cross it, "Merrily hent the foot- 
path way, and merrily hent the stile-a." 

Water, the universal detergent, is at 
war with the squalid ; and nowhere more 
thoroughly can it perform that office, with 
shower, dew and river always flush. It en- 
sures to the scenery that first requirement 
of English taste, an air of respectability. 

Chiswick churchyard accommodates, 
like most other churchyards, an odd 
jumble of sleepers. The earl of Macart- 
ney, the modern introducer of the Flow- 
ery Land to its forgotten and forgetting 
acquaintance of old, Europe ; Charles 
II. 's duchess of Cleveland ; Mary, the 
daughter of Oliver Cromwell ; Cary, the 
translator of Dante ; Kent, the architect; 
and, chief of all, Kent's tormentor, Ho- 
garth, — are among its occupants. Ho- 
garth's well-known epitaph, by Garrick, 
we may quote : 

Farewell, great painter of mankind, 

Who reached the noblest point of art, 
Whose pictured morals charm the mind, 

And through the eye correct the heart I 
If genius fire thee, reader, stay; 

If Nature move thee, drop a tear; 
If neither touch thee, turn away, 

For Hogarth's honored dust lies here. 



UP THE THAMES. 



45 



In his latter years the father of British 
caricature owned a cottage near by, where 
he spent his summers in retouching his 
plates and preparing them for posterity. 
He still retained his Leicester Fields res- 
idence, for he could have no other real 
home than old London. It is curious to 
speculate on what might have been his 
position in art had he brought himself 
to shake the cockney dust from his feet 
and seek true aesthetic training in Italy. 
One year, or three, or five, spent at Rome 
or Florence would not have sufficed to 
replace his inborn devotion to the gro- 
tesque with something higher, not to say 
the upper walks of design. Wilkie, who 
has been styled his moonlight, cannot be 
said to have been improved by a similar 
step, the works executed after his return 
being inferior to his earlier efforts. Ho- 
garth, too, might have been spoiled for 
the field he holds without challenge, and 
spent the rest of his career in cultivating 
one more elevated, but unsuited to his 
genius. It may be as well, therefore, that 
the hand of the gendarme was laid on 
his shoulder at Calais gate. The French- 
man proved an "angel unawares." He 
saved England an illustrator she values 
more highly than she would have done 
a manufacturerof Madonnas and Ajaxes. 
When the outraged Briton was whirled 



round on the deck of the little packet, 
and his nose violently pointed in the di- 
rection of the white cliffs, neither he nor 
his unpleasant manipulator was aware 
of the highly beneficial character of the 
proceeding to the party most concerned. 
Hogarth would not have admitted re- 
lationship to the Rosvlandsons, Cruik- 
shanks, Brownes and Leeches who rep- 
resent satirical art in the England of the 
nineteenth century. He would have but 
distantly recognized even Gilray, who 
belongs as much to the end of his own 
as to the beginning of our century, and 
whose works are of a higher stamp than 
those of the sketchers we have named. 
He claimed to be a character painter, re- 
mitting to a lower class altogether those 
wielders of the satiric pencil who dealt 
in the farce of " caricatura," as he termed 
it. He drew a distinction between high 
comedy and farce, and sometimes aspired 
to a position for himself in melodrama. 
Marriage a la Mode he claimed to belong 
to such a class, not without some coun- 
tenance from independent critics. He is 
needed now to administer a little whole- 
some regimen to British artists. How he 
would have lashed the Pre-Raphaelites ! 
Into what nightmares he would have ex- 
aggerated some of the whimsies of Tur- 
ner, as truly a master as himself! Pos- 




SION HOUSE. 



sibly the coming man has already arrived, 
and has caught inspiration from the ap- 
propriately square, solid, broad-bottom- 
ed monument that looks out over the 



fast-swelling hurly-burly of new London 
from Chiswick burying-ground. 

Barn Elms, on our left, was the home, 
in their respective periods, of Secretary 



4 6 



UP THE THAMES. 



Walsingham and of Cowley. That the 
latter did not select, in this choice of an 
abode, "so healthful a situation as he 
might have done," we are assisted in 
conceding by a glance at the tendency 
to swampiness which yet afflicts the spot. 
One account given of the circumstances 




BOAT-HOUSE, SION HOUSE. 

of his demise requires no heavy draft on 
the aid of malaria. He missed his way 
on returning from a "wet night" at the 
house of a friend, and passed what 
remained of the small hours under a 
hedge. A timely quotation to him then 
would have come from his own Elegy 
upon Anacreon : 

Thou pretendest, traitorous Wine! 
To be the Muses' friend and mine : 
With love and wit thou dost begin 
False fires, alas ! to draw us in ; 
Which, if our course we by them keep, 
Misguide to madness or to sleep. 
Sleep were well : thous't learnt a way 
To death itself now to betray. 

A weakness of this description, com- 
bined with his well-tried loyalty, was 
calculated to win him a friend in the 
Merry Monarch. Charles's eulogy was, 
that "Mr. Cowley hath not left a better 
man behind him in England." The 
judgment of Charles's subjects was, that 
he was the first of living English poets, 
Milton to the contrary notwithstanding. 
They placed him, accordingly, in West- 
minster Abbey, by the side of Chaucer 
and Spenser, while his rival, blind and 
in disgrace, with the bookseller's five 
pounds for the copyright of Paradise 
Lost in one pocket and — unhappily for 
his weight with the literati of the Resto- 



ration — a thousand from Cromwell in 
the other for pelting Monsieur Saumaise 
with bad Latin, was sinking into an ob- 
scure grave at St. Giles's. 

Mortlake, at the western extremity of 
what may be dubbed University Row, 
cherishes the bones of another brace of 
votaries of imagination. 
Partridge, the astrologer 
and maker of almanacs, 
has a double claim to 
immortality — first, as 
Swift's victim in The 
Taller ; and second, as 
having distinguished 
himself among the tribe 
of lying prophets by 
blundering into a pre- 
diction that came true 
— of snow in hot July. 
SS=: The other was no less 

a personage than Dr. 
Dee, familiar to readers 
of Kenilworth. Good Queen Bess lux- 
uriated, like potentates of more recent 
date, in a kitchen cabinet, and Dr. Dee 
was a member. In his counsels Eliza- 
beth apparently trusted as implicitly as in 
those of her legitimate ministers. She 
often sought his retreat, as Saul did that of 
the Witch of Endor, for supernatural en- 
lightenment. Unfortunately, the journals 
of these seances are not preserved. Dee's 
show-stone, a bit of obsidian, in which he 
pretended to mirror future events, was 
in Horace Walpole's collection at Straw- 
berry Hill. How such matters were view- 
ed in those times is evidenced by the 
facts that the learned Casaubon publish- 
ed a folio of Dee's reports of interviews 
with spirits; that Dee was made chancel- 
or of St. Paul's ; and that he was employ- 
ed to ascertain by necromancy what day 
would be most auspicious for Elizabeth's 
coronation. Still, let us remember that 
Cagliostro's triumphal march across Eu- 
rope dates back but a century ; that Cum- 
ming's prophecies constitute a standard 
authority with many most excellent and 
intelligent persons ; that Spiritualism, de- 
spite the most crushing reverses, num- 
bers many able votaries on both sides 
of the Atlantic ; and that futurity is a 
show as regularly advertised in the news- 



UP THE THAMES. 



47 



papers of one of our cities as the theatre 
or the ward- meeting. 

Very vivid is the contrast that awaits 
us at the coming curve, between the un- 
lovely town of Brentford, the" lang toun" 
of South, as Kirkcaldy is of North, Brit- 
ain, on the right, and the horticultural 
marvels of Kew on the 
left. Brentford, how- 
ever, is, as we have said 
is the case with other 
weak points of the 
Thames, screened 
from the reprobation 
of the navigator by the 
friendly trees of a large 
island. If you feel a 
personal interest in 
studying the field of 
two battles, fought, 
one eight hundred and 
sixty years ago, be- 
tween the Saxons and 
Danes — "kites and 
crows," as Hume held 
them — and the other 
two hundred and forty 
years since, between 
the Roundheads and 
the Cavaliers, you will 
pull up at Brentford. 
If you lack time or 
taste for that diversion, 
you will "choose the better part" and go 
to Kew, one of the lions of the river. In 
front stands the old red brick palace, the 
favorite country home of George III. — 
our George, so sadly berated by Mr. Jef- 
ferson and Dr. Wolcott, but a perfectly 
sincere and conscientious man, a bow- 
shot in all good points beyond either 
of his namesakes. It is to his queen, 
worthy and unbeauteous Charlotte, that 
London and its guests owe the founda- 
tion of the matchless Botanic Gardens. 
Their glories are inventoried in the guide- 
books : two hundred and forty acres of 
park and seventy-five of garden ; acres 
of space and miles of walk under glass ; 
the great palm-house, tall enough for 
most of the members of that giant fam- 
ily to erect themselves in and enjoy the 
largest liberty ; the Chinese pagoda, one 
hundred and sixty -three feet high; the 



entire vegetable world in microcosm, 
ordered, trimmed and labeled with as 
much of business precision as though, 
instead of being the manufacture of Na- 
ture, they were so many bales of Man- 
chester goods ticketed for exportation to 
some other planet ; — a collection and dis- 




ISLEWORTH CHURCH. 

play, in short, not unworthy of an empire 
whose drum-beat, etc. 

Conspicuous on the opposite side of 
the Thames, midway of the linked sweet- 
ness of Kew, stands storied Sion, a seat 
of the dukes of Northumberland. Origin- 
ally a wealthy nunnery, it was seized — 
and of course disestablished and held 
as his own — by the Eighth Harry. It 
served him as a prison for one of his 
wives, Katharine Howard, and a few 
years later furnished a night's rest to his 
own remains on their way to Windsor. 
His daughter, on what still flourishes 
of whose repute in the uncongenial soil 
of Protestant England Mr. Tennyson is 
testing the blackness of his ink, revived 
the nunnery. It had reverted to the 
Crown on the attainder of the duke of 
Northumberland, who had been granted 
it on the attainder of the Protector Som- 



48 



IT THE THAMES. 



ji, f ^mo '\ 




RICHMOND BRIDGE. 



erset, to whom Edward VI. had presented 
it. From Sion House, Lady Jane Grey 
stepped to a throne and a scaffold. Its 
associations with the misfortunes of roy- 
alty do not end here. In it the children 
of Charles I. were held in custody by 
the Parliament, and it witnessed an in- 
terview between them and their unfor- 
tunate parent, procured by special inter- 
cession as a special favor. The Smith- 
sons, representatives of the Percies, and 
fixed in the esteem of our people by the 
Institution at Washington, are in undis- 
turbed and exclusive possession now — 
too exclusive, think some tourists, who 
desire to explore the house, and find dif- 
ficulty in procuring the permission usual- 
ly accorded at other aristocratic seats. 
Yet it is easy to surfeit of sight-seeing 
without grieving over a failure to pene- 
trate the walls of Sion. 

A little above, Isleworth, the home 
of Lord Baltimore, the original grantee 
of Maryland, helps to sentinel Kew. 
The church-tower, if decapitated, would 
somewhat resemble that of Jamestown. 
Like the latter, it is of brick. The simil- 
itude is not the less apt to suggest itself 



that beyond it, as we ascend the river, 
lies Richmond. 

Having thus achieved our "on-to-Rich- 
mond " movement, we are admonished 
that justice to our objective point and to 
its more interesting neighbors, Twick- 
enham, the home of Pope and Walpole, 
the Great Park, and other attractions, re- 
quires another article. We have reach- 
ed the head of steam-navigation, and 
lost the last whiff of salt water. We for- 
get that Britain is "shrined in the sea," 
and begin to cultivate a continental sen- 
sation. The voice, the movement and 
the savor of ocean have all disappeared. 
If aught suggestive of it linger, we find it 
in the moisture that veils the bluest sky, 
lends such delicate gradations to the aeri- 
al perspective, adds a richer green to tree 
and turf, and seems to give rotundity to 
the contours of both animate and inani- 
mate Nature. That this excess of vapor is 
comparatively unattended by chill is due, 
we suppose, to the great ocean stream sent 
over by America, with her climate of ex- 
tremes, to make that of Britain one of 
moderation and equality 



UP THE THAMES. 

SECOND PAPER. 




VI EW OF RICHMOND HILL. 



ARRIVED at Richmond, a spot 
which divides with Hampton Court 
and Windsor the sovereignty of rural 
Thames, the correct thing is to climb 
Richmond Hill, an eminence which se- 
cures a distinction over both the rival 
attractions in at least one respect — that 
of breadth of prospect. That so slight 
an elevation should do so illustrates the 
extreme flatness of the country. The 
4 



rise above the plain is not so great as 
that which commands a less noted but 
not less beautiful view at our Ameri- 
can Richmond — a scene which stands 
credited with having determined the 
name of the latter city. The winding 
river, broken by islets, and the immense 
expanse of level woodland, are the lead- 
ing features of both pictures. Ours has 
less advantage of association. It has 
49 



5° 



UP THE THAMES. 




RICHMOND CHURCH. 

no Windsor and no minor palaces. The 
town in the foreground, though boasting 
a far more picturesque site, is less pic- 
turesquely built, finely as the lath-and- 
plaster Capitol stands out against the 
eastern sky. But the James, as a piece 
of running water, unquestionably excels 
the Thames. It is, in the lower and more 
placid part of its course, much like the 
Thames, while it possesses in the so-called 
falls which foam and sparkle in a thou- 
sand rapids and cascades among nearly 
as many birch- and elm-clad rocks and 
islets at the spectator's feet, an element 
wholly wanting in the other. Gazing upon 
the Virginian scene, Claude and Salvator 
would have opened their sketch -boxes 
and sat down to work side by side. The 
English would have kept the former, and 
sent the Neapolitan away. 

Let us borrow from Thomson — "Oh, 
Jamie Tamson, Jamie Tamson, oh !" — 
who sleeps in the odd little church be- 
low, and whose pen is most successful 
in the Claude style, what we need in the 
way of description of a scene so olten 
limned with both instruments: 

Here let us sweep 
The boundless landscape ; now the raptured eye 
Exulting swift to huge Augusta send, 
Now to the sister hills that skirt her plain : 
To lofty Harrow now, and now to where 
Imperial Windsor lifts her lofty brow. 
# * * * 

Here let us trace the matchless vale of Thames, 
Far winding up to where the Muses haunt — 
To Twickenham bowers ; to royal Hampton's pile : 
To Claremont's terraced heights and Esher's groves. 
Enchanting vale! beyond whate'er the Muse 
Has of Achaia or Hesperia sung. 



Another minstrel from 
Tweedside tried his hand 
upon it in The Heart of 
Midlothian . He stops 
Jeanie and the duke, not- 
withstanding the life-and- 
death importance of their 
errand, to mark where "the 
Thames, here turreted with 
villas and there garlanded 
with forests, moved on 
slowly and placidly, like 
the mighty monarch of the 
scene to whom all its oth- 
er beauties were but acces- 
sories." It is but a limited 
monarchy, of the mild 
British constitutional type, that can be 
attributed to a sluggish stream of a hun- 
dred yards in width, majestic as it may 
have appeared to the poet of "Tweed's 
fair river, broad and deep." In this case, 
stateliness and dignity attach rather to 
the land than to the water, if only be- 
cause there is more of it. Magnitude is 
essential to them. Kings must not be 
little, as Louis XIV. taught us by his 
robes and padding and periwigs. It is 
an odd sort of sovereign, moreover, that 
occupies the lowest place in the presence- 
chamber, and is dominated by all his 
surroundings. 

One visit will not do for the scene be- 
fore us. He who desires to test its mul- 
tiformity must see it again and again. 
The English sky has a vast variety of 
cloud-effect, which repeats itself in "mov- 
ing accidents," as artists term them, "by 




UP THE THAMES. 



51 



flood and field." When 
the sky is not entirely 
overcast, the ever -va- 
rying catches of light 
and shade on so broad 
a surface forbid its pre- 
senting exactly the 
same appearance for 
more than a few mo- 
ments together. The 
white buildings scat- 
tered over it assist this 
kaleidoscopic move- 
ment. As we gaze upon 
a smooth patch of un- 
broken shadow some 
miles off, it is suddenly and sharply 
flecked, thanks to a drift of the cloud 
above it, by a bright light, and another 
and another, till a whole town or range 
of villas, before unseen, brightens the 
distance. Onward sweeps the cloud, 
followed by its fellows, and these new 
objects fade into nothingness, while oth- 
ers beyond them, or it may be nearer, 
flash into view. The water aids this in- 
cessant change in the general and par- 
ticular distribution of light and shade by 
its reflection. It deepens shadow and 
intensifies light. It is never sombre, 
however dull may be the visage of the 
land. Somewhere, edging an island or 



«K 




thomson's garden. 

shooting out from a point, it will furn- 
ish a bit of glitter, all the more effective 
because of the gloomy setting that de- 
mands it and supplies its foil. 

Singular as is the predominance, in 
this view, of copse and grove, over the 
signs of habitation and industry belong- 
ing to the heart of so densely peopled a 
kingdom, art has not failed of its share 
in decorating the foreground. Villa and 
terrace cluster along the slope ; for this 
has always been a favorite retreat of the 
Londoners, whether they came for a day 
or for a decade. Turning from the riv- 
er, we lapse again under the sovereignty 
of turf and leaf as we enter the gateway 




VIF.W FROM RICHMOND HILL. 



53 



UP THE THAMES. 







r^^^^mm^ 



GATK, RICHMOND GREAT PARK. 



of the Great Park. This must have been 
a second surprise to our countryman, 
whose disappointment with the front 
view vented itself in the remark: "Why, 
this country wants clearing!" 

Here we are within the precincts of 
royalty. The Park, some eight miles in 
circuit, belongs to the Crown ; as part of 
it, with the old palace of Sheen, has 
done since Henry I., and the rest since 
Charles I., who purchased and enclosed 
it at great cost to his purse and popular- 
ity, of neither of which had he much to 
spare. The gay groups of holiday folks 
who throng the walks suggest, instead, 
that it is the property of the people. The 
phrases are becoming synonymous. The 
grounds attached to the royal palaces, in 
this as in other parts of England, are 




EDWARD III. 



more enjoyed by the masses than by the 
sovereign. The queen abandons them 
all for her new boxes, with their scant 
and simple demesnes, at Balmoral and 
Osborne. Two centuries and more have 
elapsed since any of her predecessors 
lived at Richmond, and the chances are 
against its becoming the abode of her 
successors. It is too historical to be a 
home. Kings and queens, like common 
people, like to set up their own house- 
hold gods and construct a lair for them- 
selves. They do not like, even in the 
matter of a dwelling-place, to wholly 
sink their personality and become a mere 
dynastic expression. This fancy for set- 
ting up for themselves has been espe- 
cially strong among the Hanoverians. 
George III. liked to bury himself at Kew 
or among his pigs and sheep on the 
farms into which he converted part of 
Windsor Park. His hopeful son estab- 
lished himself at Carlton House, with 
the occasional relaxation of the Chinese 
monstrosity at Brighton. The present 
prince of Wales has domiciled himself 
at several places. His favorite resi- 
dence, Sandringham, is a new purchase. 
Should he retain his liking for it, it may 
rank in future story with Woodstock or 
Sheen. 

Sheen or Shene, with a variety of oth- 
er spellings, was anciently the name of 
Richmond. Sheen Palace was occupied 
by the first three Edwards : the hero of 
Crecy there closed his eyes on the glory 
of this world in the leafy month of June, 



UP THE THAMES. 



53 




RICHMOND GREAT PARK. 



when the England whose language un- 
der him first breathed the atmosphere 
of a court, and who singles him out as 
her favorite among the Plantagenets, 
was looking her loveliest. Through the 
window came to the dying warrior the 
murmur of the same river and the breath 
of the same groves we now look upon. 
Far in the west the new towers of Wind- 
sor, built by him, broke, as now, the flat 
horizon. The mass of leafage that match- 
ed it in the distant east may have bent 
above Chaucer's pilgrims on their merry 



return from Canterbury with sins newly 
shriven and an ample stock of indul- 
gences to cover a new supply in the fu- 
ture. If the tales with which they be- 
guiled their penitential way to the sacred 
shrine were of the character given us by 
their poetic chronicler, gay indeed must 
have been those which, pious duty dis- 
charged and conscience disburdened, 
cheered their homeward ride. 

Henry VII. gave the place its present 
name in honor of Richmond in York- 
shire, from which he derived his title. 




ORLEANS HOUSE. 



54 



UP THE THAMES. 




DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH'S VILLA. 



seized the limbs of 
the old. But the 
nearest approach 
possible then to this 
achievement existed 
only in the imag- 
ination of Mr. Bur- 
bage's partner in the 
Globe Theatre. That 
very practical busi- 
ness-man was exer- 
cising his mind on 
the invention of 
the still popular 
despatch-machine 
called Ariel, which 
promised to 

— drink the air before 
me, and return 
Or e'er your pulse twice 
beat. 



It witnessed his closing hours, as also 
those of the last of his dynasty. It was 
down Richmond Hill that "Cousin Gary" 
dashed on his long gallop to Scotland to 
tell James VI. that the halls which had 
received the body of his ancestor, James 
IV., a slain enemy of England, brought 
from Flodden wrapped in lead and toss- 
ed unburied into a lumber-room, were 
his. In our day Cary would have sim- 
ply stepped into the telegraph-office, and 
at the cost of a shilling placed the in- 
formation in the hands of the new in- 
cumbent before the rigor mortis had 



The first of the Stuarts did not greatly 
affect Richmond, perhaps because he did 
not like treading too closely in the foot- 
steps of the murderer of his mother, and 
perhaps because of other associations with 
the place. Elizabeth herself had been 
a prisoner at Richmond for a short time 
in her sister's reign. It served a similar 
purpose for Charles I. in 1647. All this 
helps to explain the fancy of monarchs 
for setting up new establishments. The 
old ones, in the course of time, accumu- 
late such an unpleasant stock of reminis- 
cences. Memento moris lurk under the 




MARBLE HILL, TWICKENHAM. 



UP THE THAMES. 



55 



archways and glare out from ivy-clad 
casements. The Tuileries have earned 
the disgust of three French dynasties ; 
and no British sovereign will ever carry 
a good appetite into Inigo Jones's ban- 
queting-room at Whitehall, beautiful as 
it is. 

A further reminder of the misfortunes 
of royalty is furnished by a glance across 
the river. A stately mansion on the 
shore opposite Richmond was the re- 
treat, during part of his exile, of the 
"citizen king," as Louis Philippe delight- 
ed to style himself; and also, by another 
shuffle of Fortune's cards, since 1848 that 
of one of his sons. He left behind him 
an excellent repute, as did Charles X. at 
Holyrood, Louis le Bien-aime at Hart- 
well, and the latest, not last probably, 
of the migratory Louises at Chiselhurst. 
It may be doubted if any of them was 
ever so happy as in England, allowing 
them their full share of the Frenchman's 
proverbial contempt for a home any- 
where outside of France. The sense 
of repose and security could not fail to 
be the keenest of luxuries to the occu- 
pant of so shaky a throne. Nowhere in 
the broad British asylum could that sense 
be more complete and refreshing than 
here under the sleepy trees by the sleepy 
river; everything in the remotest degree 
suggestive of war, tumult and revolution 
smothered out ; the whole strength of the 
British empire interposed against peril 
from the fevered Continent, and the 
peace of centuries inwoven into the 



ways of the people and the air of their 
abodes. In the time of Louis Philippe 
that prophecy of the first Darwin — the 
father who looked to the future, and not 
the son who reads the past — which har- 
nesses steam to " the slow barge " had not 
come to pass. That snail like craft, de- 
pendent on the tow-rope and such cap- 
fuls of wind as the groves allowed to 
filter through, monopolized the river. 
Even the very moderate commotion due 
to the passage of a small steamboat was 
wanting. And that is again disappear- 
ing. The wrinkles it drew upon the 
calm and venerable face — venerable in 
an old age the most hale and green im- 
aginable — of Father Thames, are fading 
away, and he smiles up from his leafy 
couch into the face of king or common- 
er, Frenchman, Briton or American, with 
a freshness that is a sovereign balm for 
inward bruises of heart and mind. These 
Bourbons and Bonapartes all grew fat 
in England. Whatever else she may 
grudge the "blarsted foreigners," she is 
lavish to them of adipose tissue. The 
fat of the land will always find its way 
to their ribs, as the eglantine will to the 
cheeks. The ever- watchful pickets thrown 
by the nerves to the whole circuit of the 
body physical in our climate find them- 
selves speedily driven in on landing upon 
British soil. Its assembled forces no long- 
er sleep upon their arms. 

Let us trust that the enforced migra- 
tions of Gallic rulers are all over, and that 
the Septennate of Marshal MacMahon 




TWICKENHAM CHURCH. 



56 



UP THE THAMES. 




WIMBLEDON COMMON. 



may end, after the scriptural rule, in ju- 
bilee. Should it fall out otherwise, how- 
ever, the long tiers of villas that terrace 
the green slopes of Richmond and Twick- 
enham are ample to accommodate gen- 
erations of exiles. Good company awaits 
them, too ; for fashion takes the locality 
under its wing, and the peerage is not 
unrepresented among what we should 
call the settlers The "bauld Buccleuch," 
head of the rieving clan Scott, still makes 
occasional raids across the Border upon 
the beef of the Sassenachs, with the dif- 
ference that he now brings knife and 
fork along instead of hurrying his sir- 
loin northward on four legs at full trot. 

Orleans House, we should add, was 
not indebted for its first introduction to 
royalty to Mr. William Smith, as Louis 
Philippe named himself on his final es- 
cape from Paris, having borrowed the 
idea of adopting that widely known sur- 
name possibly from Buckingham and the 
prince of Wales (afterward Charles I.) 
on their visit, also incognito, to the same 
city in 1623. Queen Anne, when sim- 
ple princessof Denmark, and on hergood 
behavior to secure the honor of rising to 
a higher title after the demise of Dutch 
William, made it her residence. On an 
ait in front, sacred now to bourgeois pic- 



nics, and named Eel-pie Island from the 
viand to which, in deference to their 
tastes, it is consecrated, the last hope of 
the Protestant Stuarts, her son, the little 
duke of Gloucester, was wont to drill his 
young playmates in mimic war. But the 
Fates had other use for him. Hence the 
four Georges, Queen Victoria and — Ar- 
thur II. (?) Years after, when Mrs. Mash- 
am's and the duchess of Marlborough's 
handmaiden had followed her boy, Caro- 
line, queen of the Second George, was 
entertained by Mr. Secretary Johnstone, 
the then proprietor of Orleans House. 
Her visit is memorable only as having 
caused the addition of the semi-octag- 
onal excrescence seen in the engraving. 
That it was not repeated may be ac- 
counted for by the circumstance that 
Marble Hill, the next house, was built 
by her loving spouse for the countess of 
Suffolk. The reader will recall the death- 
bed scene, the request to marry again, 
and George's impassioned protestation, 
through blinding tears, "Non.j'aurai des 
mattresses /" Capital fun those " wee wee 
German lairdies" have purveyed, unwit- 
tingly, for the wits of their days, from 
Swift down through Wilkes and Wal- 
pole to Tom Moore. The Hanoverian 
line may thus be said to form the ver- 



UP THE THAMES. 



57 



tebral column of a century of 
squibs, or rather the wood- 
en pole around which they 
twine (not very lovingly) and 
shoot. It was a queer family. 
Its little peculiarity, notorious 
through its whole career on 
English soil down to our day, 
of being perpetually at war 
with itself, was alone ample 
material for satire. Lord 
Granville, one of its minis- 
ters, said, "It always has 
quarreled, and always will 
quarrel, from generation to 
generation." The princes of 
Wales have always been in 
opposition. Prior to George 
III., who was prompted to a 
neat touch in his first address 
to his Parliament in declar- 
ing himself "entirely Eng- 
lish," and even in that furn- 
ishing new food for lampoons, 
the weaning of it from Ger- 
many, in speech, habits or 
residence, was not much 
more than a pretence. The difficulty of 
extracting the king from the delights of 
his Hanoverian hermitage, once there, 
was a perpetual worry to Lords and 
Commons. The vernacular of his sub- 
jects was as foreign as Sanskrit to the 
First George, and nearly as much so 
to the Second. The former commu- 
nicated with his prime minister, Wal- 
pole, in Latin — royal Latin, a shade 
better than dog Latin, and not so good 
as law Latin. Carteret had the ad- 
vantage of his chief. As Macaulay 
says, he "dismayed his colleagues by 
the volubility with which he addressed 
His Majesty in German. They listen- 
ed with envy and terror to the myste- 
rious gutturals, which might possibly 
convey suggestions very little in unison 
with their wishes." 

Horace Walpole, whose castle of 
cards, as fantastic and almost as un- 
substantial as his Castle of Otranto, 
lies about a mile above Twickenham, 
has sent down to us many gossipy 
items in reference to Richmond and 
its neighborhood. His father enjoyed, 




WIMBLEDON HOUSE. 

among his long list of other profitable 
and pleasant sinecures, the rangership 
of the Great Park. The office was nom- 
inally held by his son, but the statesman 
made it his resort on Saturdays and Sun- 
days. His relaxation from business con- 




kean's tomb. 



58 



UP THE THAMES. 




pope's villa — 1744. 

sisted, he said, in doing more business 
than he could in town on those days. 
He and George found time, however, 
to do a good deal of shooting over the 
twenty-three hundred acres which com- 
pose the enclosure, and after that to dine 
tete-a-tete. Her Grace of Suffolk, fear- 
ful of the effect of post-prandial punch 
on the royal head, and consequent dis- 
closure to the astute minister of more 
than he might otherwise know, placed 
some German spies around the board to 




check the elector's 
potations. The plan 
failed, the indignant 
monarch putting 
them to flight with a 
tremendous volley of 
the most sulphurous 
oaths and epithets 
the High Dutch vo- 
cabulary can boast. 
Blucher might have 
envied his accom- 
plishments in that 
line. 

Let us traverse the 
range of these old 
sportsmen to the 
south-eastern end 
of the park. The 
descendants of 
the bucks whose 
haunches furnished 
the chief dish at 
their — in several 
senses — rude feasts troop across our 
woodland path or gaze at us from their 
beds of fern. Little cottagers, quite as 
shy, or little Londoners at play, quite 
the reverse, help to people the glades. 
What should we more naturally hit upon, 
under the greenwood tree in these depths 
of merry England, than Robin Hood 
Gate ? It points us, in a short walk, to 
Robin Hood Farm on the edge of Wim- 
bledon Common. There is nothing here 
of the bold forester but the name ; and 
that we find in other parts of England, 
for he represented the popular and anti- 
privilege party in the dim days ere party 




pope's tomb. 



UP THE THAMES. 



59 



or constitutional government was invent- 
ed. Some stretch of the fancy may bring 
him back in the flesh on match-days, 
when the modern successor of his trusty 
yew is displaying its powers in the hands, 
perchance, of keen -eyed and stalwart 
yeomen from over-sea forests undream- 
ed of by him. "Teams " take the place 
of the bands of merry Sherwood, and 
the distance marked off for their aim is 
fifty score instead of six score, the ulti- 
matum of the long bow. This he would, 
after a bit of the conservative hesitation 
of the Englishman, admire; and he would 
mourn that he and Friar Tuck had lived 
too soon. Less adjustment of his per- 
ceptions and sympathies would suffice 
to place him quite at home among the 
modern throng upon the ground. Al- 
lowing for the change of dress, absurd 
enough, from the lithe jerkin and hood 
to the stiff hat and tight coat, he would 
detect, in the voices that spoke from and 
the forms imprisoned in the new garb, 
the rugged Saxons of old, deep of speech, 
deep also of thew and bone, rough and 
blunt in play and talk. He might won- 
der whence came the thousands that 
dotted the breezy swells of the common, 
and the long lines of equipages, each 
more elegant than the most sumptuous 
litter of Cceur de Lion's court ; but he 



would trace some triumph of his politics 
in the nearer fraternizing of Giles on 
foot and Fitz on wheels or horseback, 
implied in friendly rivalry at the butts 
of peer and commoner. The queen's 
son-in-law. a Redshank from the savage 
fastnesses of Argyll, figuring among the 
contestants, with lesser lights of his class 
around him, would seem a realization of 
his dreams. 

The common, too, is yielding to the 
march of progress. Long beleaguered 
by rank on rank of villas, they are gath- 
ering it to themselves. As we write gangs 
of navvies are leveling the embankment 
of " Caesar's Camp " on its southern edge, 
a circular entrenchment of six hundred 
feet in diameter, the two opposite en- 
trances, perfect till to-day, traversed by a 
farm-lane, through which Hodge, Buck 
and Bright, three well-matched cronies, 
lumber along in the track of the legions. 
The new Rome is not to be gainsaid. 
Her irresistible march sweeps away her 
own pagani — pace Hodge, who is unques- 
tionably orthodox, and thinks with Mr. 
Gladstone, if he ever thinks at all, the 
Anglican Church "worth preserving" if 
only to provide him a Sunday's snooze 
below the curate as he 

Heers un a-bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock 
ower his yead. 







LADY HOWE'S VILLA, MISCALLED POPE'S — 1 842. 



6o 



UP THE THAMES. 




:--v'f ■' 



Wimbledon House offers its park, beau- 
tiful exceedingly, for an eastward stroll 
toward London if we wish to go back. 
But such is not our present plan. Stand- 
ing on Charles I.'s "musk-milion ground, 
trenched, manured and very well order- 
ed for the growth of musk-milions " — 
wherein, all undreaming of his fate, a 
few days before he was brought to trial 
by Bradshawe & Co., he gave directions 
for the planting of some choice Spanish 
seed — we listen, unseduced, to the siren 
strains of the South-western steam-whis- 
tle, that shrills across lake and grove from 
the station below, and turn back by a 
more southerly route than that which 
brought us hither. How smoothly and 
unconsciously the miles roll off under 
our feet in this cool air and on these cool 
pathways ! An American, all unused to 
walk on the English scale, forgets him- 
self, and is surprised to see how distance 
disappears. This time we cross the park 
toward Ham, passing the knoll where 
Henry is said to have waited impa- 
tiently to hear the gun that announced 
his summary divorce from Anne Boleyn, 
and to have sprung instantly into the 
saddle to announce his happiness to her 
destined successor. The bend of the 



river which we now cross may be called 
Poet's Corner. Thomson's resting-place 
at Richmond we have mentioned. Ed- 
mund Kean, the powerful interpreter of 
poets, if not one himself, sleeps by his 
side; the thunders of the pit, whereof he 
had his full share, all forgotten. This 
nook was the haunt also of Collins, who 
composed at Richmond some of his best 
productions. Unless on the principle of 
Christopher North, who, if called on to de- 
scribe the loveliest of landscapes, would, 
he said, have carried his writing-desk 
into the deepest cellar of the Canongate, 
it is not very apparent how this slumber- 
ous river-side could have supplied in- 
spiration for a stirring "Ode to the Pas- 
sions." 

Over Twickenham hovers a mightier 
shade than these. " Close by those 
meads for ever crowned with flowers," 
and quite as close to the river, once stood 
Pope's house. It was destroyed by Lady 
Howe, purchaser of the place, early in 
this century. This fair Erostratus comes 
in for a vast amount of inverted bene- 
diction from pilgrims to the shrine of 
the author of the Rape of the Lock ; and 
the poet himself, could he have look- 
ed into futurity, would probably, after 



UP THE THAMES. 



61 




TEDDING'! ON CHURCH. 



the example of Shakespeare, have be- 
queathed some maledictions to the dese- 
crator. But it stands to reason that she 
had a perfect right to build a house on 
her own property to suit herself. What, 
else, were the use of being a true-born 
Briton, with her house for a castle, and 
a right, of course, to model it as she 
thought best for defence or any other 
purpose ? She did not greatly improve 
the style of the structure, it is true, but 
that also was her own concern. She has 
the undisputed merit, moreover, of pre- 
serving the famous grotto in tolerable 
condition. Pope's account of this struc- 
ture, fashionable in his day, will be as 
much as the reader wants of it: "From 
the river Thames you see through my arch 
up a walk of the wilderness to a kind of 
open temple, wholly composed of shells 



in the rustic manner, and from that dis- 
tance under the temple, passing sudden- 
ly and vanishing, as through a perspec- 
tive glass. When you shut the door of 
this grotto it becomes in the instant, from 
a luminous room, a camera obscura, on 
the walls of which all the objects of the 
river, hills, woods and boats are forming 
a moving picture in their visible radia- 
tions," etc. 

The rheumatics seize us as we think 
upon it. Was it not damp enough above 
ground for the shivering little atomy, 
that he must needs have a subaqueous 
burrow, like a water-rat, and invite his 
guests to 

Where Thames' translucent wave 
Shines, a broad mirror, through the shady cave, 
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill, 
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill ? 




HANWELL CHURCH. 



62 



UP THE THAMES. 




HARROW CHURCH. 

Pliny's description of his villa seems to 
us more excellent fooling than this. And 
yet it was true taste once in the eyes of 
a writer a leading trait of whose verse, 
in selection of words and imagery, is 
exquisite taste. He had the aid, too, in 
his decorations, of the glass of fashion 
to the kingdom, the prince of Wales, 
who presented him with sundry urns and 
vases. 

The most interesting fact connected 
with this seat, aside from the fame of its 
creator and of the friends who visited it 
— Swift, Bolingbroke, Gay, Arbuthnot, 
etc. — is that, like Abbotsford, it was built 
by the pen. Abbotsford, the child of 
mediaeval romances, was erected, natu- 
rally enough, in the Gothic style. Pope's 
villa, the fruit of his profits in "tradu- 
cing" Homer, bears, or bore, as fitly the 
Periclean imprint. The blind old bard, 
weakened as he was in Pope's heroics, 
was yet, "all his original brightness not 
yet lost," strong enough to build for him 
a better house than is likely ever to have 
sheltered his own hoary head. Pope 
coined him into broad British sovereigns, 



and among Anglo-Sax- 
on readers, as a mass, 
he is current under 
Pope's mint - mark to 
this day. W h e n we 
quote the Iliad, we usu- 
ally quote Pope. A host 
of other translations 
since, some of them su- 
perior in accuracy both 
of language and spirit, 
have failed to supplant 
his. Only a poet can 
translate a poet, and in 
such a translator we par- 
don liberties that would 
be scouted in others. 
He is sure to give us 
something fine, if not 
precisely what was bar- 
gained for. The others 
irritate us by the very 
exactness which he 
could afford to neglect, 
and which is their only 
merit. Pope's Homer, 
washed and dressed up 
to the requirements of our civilization, 
has outlived the blunt semi - savage 
chalked in hard outline for us by his 
competitors. 

From Richmond Hill we take in at 
one view the lairs of the greatest English 
poet of the eighteenth century and the 
chief of the nineteenth. Bluish-gray in 
the north — blue it would be in our atmo- 
sphere — rise the towers of Harrow-on- 
the-Hill. As we have now reached the 
upper level of the Thames, the first weir 
and lock occurring at Teddington, a short 
distance above where we stand, we may 
as well branch off through the rural part 
of Middlesex and follow the valley of 
the Brent, by Hanwell, with its neat 
church, to Harrow, lounge in the play- 
ground of Byron, Peel and some other 
notable boys, and regain our original 
starting-point by the great North-western 
Railway, the world's wonder among iron 
roads, with its two thousand locomotives, 
its forty thousand wagons and coaches, 
and its revenue larger than that of the 
British empire a hundred years ago. 
Master John Lyon, when in 1592 he 



UP THE THAMES. 



63 



endowed the school, show- 
ed admirable judgment in 
his selection of a site. It 
occupies the highest ground 
in Middlesex. From its 
belfry we look down upon 
the "huge dun canopy" of 
St. Paul's in the east, and 
imagine, through the mist, 
fog or smoke that usually 
forms a secondary canopy 
to the city beneath it, Lon- 
don. Over wood and hill, 
to the south-west, the view 
stretches to Windsor; the 
battlements of intellectual 
confronting those of feudal 
and monarchical power — 
siegeworks raised against 
the stronghold of despotism 
at long range, and working 
through a long leaguer, but 
triumphant at last. 

The church dates, in part 
at least, from long before 
the school. They show 
you, in the base of the tow- 
er and the columns between 
the nave and the aisles, 
masonry attributed to Lan- 
franc in the time of the 
Conqueror. Near by, on the summit of 
the hill, you find a curious achievement 
of Nature a good deal older still in an 
unfailing well from which Saxon swine- 
herds may have drunk when the Falaise 



IK i**4r 



. «■ 




HARROW SCHOOL. 

tanner's daughter was in maiden medita- 
tion fancy free. It was a fair Castaly 
for Childe Harold, yet supplemental to 
those among "the highest hills that rise 
above the source of Dee." To them he 







HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL. 



64 



CF THE THAMES. 




"BYRON'S [X>MB." 

himself traces the Muse's half- Hedged 
Autterings that ripened into so broad a 
flight : 

The infant rapture still survived the boy, 
And 1 och-na-Gair with [da looked o'er Troy. 

He was then a child of but eight years. 
Hut for the lucky snatch o( an attend- 
ant, he would, on one of his boyish 
scrambles above the Linn of Dee, have 
tumbled into the torrent and left Ten- 
nyson unchallenged. Three more de- 
cades were allotted to the line of the By- 
rons. The glory o\ eight hundred years 
was to be crowded into that closing span. 
The place, with a slight reservation in 
behalf of his school- and form-fellow Peel, 
belongs to Byron. He is the second 
founder of the ancient seminary. Mote 
than that — as he would, we fear, were he 
alive, be amused to learn — he has, after 
a fashion, reconsecrated the church. The 
charm about that edifice lies no longer 
in crypt and column coeval with the 
Conquest, nor even in the edifying min- 
istrations of the duly presented rector, 
but in a rusty old tombstone over some 



forgotten dead which 
the poet so much af- 
fected as a seat that 
his playmates dubbed 
it Byron's tomb. From 
it Windsor Castle is in 
full view, and consti- 
tuted, conceivably, the 
core of his b o y i s h 
meditations, It is still 

open as a resting place 

-. to any sym pathetic 
tourists who choose 
this mode of absorbing 
the afflatus. It does 
not appear, however, 
that any verse much 
superior to the Hours 
of Idleness has ever 
resulted from the pro- 
cess. We, at least, are 
content to stop with — 

Oft when oppressed with s.ut, 
foreboding gloom, 

f sat reclined upon our I'.ivor- 

ite tomb ; 

and, neither silting 
nor reclining, much 
less both at once, we wind up our dawd- 
ling with catching a rl\ and utilizing its 
wings to reach the station in time to 
catch the next train from Mugby — <ilias 
Rugby — Junction, another educational 
centre of note, known to more as a rail- 
road-crossing than as a school, since 
everybody travels and everybody reads 
Dickens, while the readers of Arnold 
and Tom Brown are comparatively a 
select few. 

Ere we are well settled in our seat we are 
whizzing past Hanipstcad Heath, with its 
beautiful spread of down, grove, cottage 
and villa, and "slowing" into the — in its 
way — equally sublime station-building at 
Euston Square. Here, if our sight-see- 
ing enthusiasm be proof to the chaos of 
cabs and cabmen, porters, unprotected 
females and male travelers, and passers 
who plunge forward with that singleness 
of purpose and devotion to Number One 
characteristic of the bold Briton in a 
crowd and elsewhere, we may protect 
our flanks with arms akimbo, and, un- 
disturbed bv the wreck of luggage and 



UP THE THAMES. 



65 



the crash of cabs, look up at the Statue 
of honesi 1 1 phen »on, the apostle 

of the rail and Watt of the locomotive. 
It is as much above the general run of 

railroad statuary as the facade of the 
building is above that of railroad archi- 
te< ture. He was a sculpturesque old fel- 
low, with a career "of the same." The 
tubular boiler is a better study for the 
chisel than the detached condenser or 
the spinning-jenny; or Peel senior's pars- 
ley pattern, which made the fortune of 
tin. house, sent Robert to Harrow and 
set ured the overthrow of the Corn laws. 
I Lad we been consulted as to the design, 
we should have proposed for a bas-relief 
on each side of the pedestal the smash- 
ed cow and the floored M. R, distin- 
guished in George's chief recorded joke 
—that of the classic "coo." Not that it 
was his only joke, by any means, for he 
came fully up to the Yorkshire standard 
in point of "wut," and was generally 
able to give more formidable antagonists 
than the average run of British legisla- 
tors at least as good as he got. 

Here we are, back in the heart of the 
metropolis, only a mile and a half from 
Waterloo Rridge. We have time left us to- 
day to hunt up some other seeable things. 
To begin, let us employ the next half 
minute in getting out of London. How ? 



Do we move east, west, north, south, or 
in the air? Neither, We step into 

middle of the street and dive. ' >'ir first 
ition in moving toward Orcus is, 
naturally enough, a sulphurous smell. 
Our next is a very comfortable railroad- 
car; and our third, a few seconds behind 
the heels of its predecessor, a rapid move- 
ment, attended by tin- Hades like music 
of shriek, rattle and groan familiar to all 
who have passed through a tunnel. We 
are traveling on another marvelous rail- 
way, eighteen miles underground, but 
really endless, since it forms an ellipti- 
cal circuit around the central part of 
the metropolis. It bears the appropriate 
name of the Metropolitan Railway, 
four millions of dollar-, [>':r mile or eighty 
an inch ; carried forty-four millions of 
passengers in 1874, an d twenty-four mil- 
lions in the first six months of 1875 '< 
runs one hundred and ninety-five trains 
of its own and eight hundred and forty- 
nine for the different open-air roads which 
lead to all parts of the kingdom, each 
"swinging round the circle " in fifty-five 
minutes, and stopping at some or all of 
twenty-two stations ; and otf'.-rs the sta- 
tistically-inclined inquirer many other 
equally stunning figures. Such is the 
parent of rapid transit in London. Young 
as it is, it has a large family already, mul- 




KKNSINOION PALACE. 



66 



UP THE THAMES. 




KENSINGTON CHURCH. 



tiplying, as we write, to such an extent 
that arithmetic fails us. Its progeny wan- 
der down to Greenwich, pop through the 
Thames Tunnel, and meander among 
and under the great docks in the most 
bewildering way. 

But our destination is in the opposite 
quarter. We push westward, under the 
middle of the Marylebone road, its pon- 
derous traffic rolling over our heads. 
Skirting Tyburnia, with its unpleasant 
memories of Jack Sheppard and other 
unfortunate heroes of his kidney, we 
emerge from our subterranean whirl at 
Kensington Gardens, the western ampli- 
fication of Hyde Park. 

The old structure, resembling a board- 
ing-school or a hospital, and which would 
improve the beautifully planted park by 
its absence, began its history as a palace 
under William III., the genial and self- 
sacrificing Hollander so dear to Whig 
historians. It has probably finished its 
caneer in that capacity under Victoria, 
who was born there, and who has remit- 
ted it, like Hampton Court and the old 



Palais Royal of Paris, to a class of oc- 
cupants it will be hard to rummage out 
unless the rookery is set fire to. 

It is afternoon, and a Guards' band is 
playing across the avenue to the left. 
The crowd is drifting toward them. Let 
us push a little farther west, past the not 
particularly interesting village church of 
Kensington, and follow in the footsteps 
of most of the literary and political ce- 
lebrities of the nineteenth century to the 
most picturesque and (in strictly modern 
history) most noted of the old country- 
houses that London has swallowed up. 
This is Holland House, the home of 
Addison, the two Foxes, and, more fresh- 
ly familiar to our day than either, the 
last Lord Holland and his wife. If the 
lady kept her lions in order by much 
the same "heroic" method of discipline 
adopted by keepers of a menagerie, ab- 
ruptly silencing Macaulay when his long 
fits of talk, and snubbing Rogers when 
his short fits of cynicism, began to bore, 
her quiet and amiable spouse was always 
prompt to apply balm to their wounds. 



UP THE THAMES. 



6? 



He was the chief of British Maecenases. 
The series of ana begotten of his sym- 
posia — of the list of guests at which, in- 
vited or uninvited, he used to say he 
was never advised until after they had 
met — would make a fair library. 

The hour, as we turn eastward, speaks 
of evening. The summer sun, in a latitude 
five degrees north of Quebec and a day 
of eighteen hours, contradicts it. We may 
pass in from what only the other day was 
the country toward what is but technical- 
ly the City, and is reverting in sparseness 



of population to the country character 
and find, on the way, the life of London 
streets as stirring as, and more gay than, 
at high noon. The heavier and slower 
features of it have died out. Drays, 
wagons and 'buses leave the road clearer. 
We see farther and see more. No longer 
blockaded to a block, the whole length 
of the street opens before us. Daylight 
brightens into gaslight, and we realize 
that for to-day we are no longer out of 
town. 




U P T ll E T H A M is 



PHIRD PAPER 







<aggH|rilte->S 








HAMPTON COURT -WEST FRONT, 



TO pan our movement shall be up 
the rhames by rail, starting on the 
south side ©1 the rivei to reach an ob- 
jective point on the north bank. s>i 
ted is the stream, and so much more 
crooked are the different systems of rail- 
ways, with theii competing branches 
crossing each other and making the most 
audacious inroads on each other's terri- 
tory, that the direction in which we are 
6S 



traveling at any given moment, or the 
station from which we start, is a verj 
poor index to the quarter for which we 
are bound, The railways, to say noth- 
ing of the river, that wanders at its own 
sweel will, as water commonly does in a 
country offering it no obstructions, are 
quite defiant of their geographical names, 
[he Great Western runs north, west and 

south - oast ; the South - western strikes 



UP THE THAMES, 



69 




HAMPTON COURT I.OOKINC UP I HI KIVI 



south, south-east and north wesl j while 
the Chatham .mil 1 )over distributes itself 
over most of the region south east of 
London, closing its circuit by .1 line along 
the coast of the Channel thai completes 
.1 triangle. Wecan go almost anywhere 
by any road, it is necessary, however, 
in this as in other mundane proi eedings, 
to make a selection. We must have a 
will before we find a way. Let our way, 
then, be to Watei loo station on the South- 
western rail. 

1 1 all an hour's run lands us at Hamp- 
ton Court, with a number of fellow-pas- 
sengers i" keep us < ompany il we want 
them, and in fact whether we want them 

Or not. Those who travel into or out of 
a city of tour millions must lay their ac- 

count with being ever in a crowd. Our 

consolation is, that in the city the crowd 
is so (onstant and so wholly Strange to 

us as to defeat its effect, and create the 
feeling of solitude we have so often been 
told oi ; while outside ol it, at the pat ks 
and Bhow plat es, the amplitude of space, 
densitj and variety ol plantations, and 
multiplicity oi carefully designed turns, 
nooks and retreats, are such that retire- 
ment "i a more genuine 1 harat tei is with- 
in easy reach. The crowd, we know, is 

abOUt us, but it does not elbOW US, and 

we nerd hardly see it. The current oi 
humanity, springing from one 01 a dozen 

trains or Steamboats, dribbles away, s( 

alter Leaving its parent source, into a mul- 
titude of little divergent channels, like 



irrigating water, and covcis the suil.ne 

without intei fcrent e. 

It would be a curious statistical inquiry 
how many visitors Hampton Court has 
lost since the Cartoons were removed in 

[865 to the South Kensington Museum. 

Actually, of course, the whole numbei 
has iiu reased, is m< reasing, and is not 

going to be diminished. The query is, 
llow many moie there would he now 
were those eminent hits of pasteboard — 

slit up for the guidance oi piece-work at 

a I lemish loom, tossed alter the weaveis 
had done with them into a luinhei loom, 

then alter a century's neglect disinterred 

by the taste of Kuhens and Charles L, 

brought to England, then pooi frayed 
and laded fragments glued together and 

made the chief decoration Of a royal pal- 
ace- — still in the place assigned them by 

the munificence and judgment of Charles? 
For our part— and we may speak for most 
Americans when we heard, thought oi 

lead ol I lampion Court, we thoiijdil ol 

the Cartoons. Engravings oi them were 

plenty niueh moi e so ilia n ol the palace 

itself. Numbers of domestic 1 onnoisseurs 

know Raphael principally as the p.unh i 
ol the ( ai toons. 

A few who have not heard oi them have 
heard oi Wolsey. The pursj old 1 at 

din.il fin nr. ins the sin viving one oi the 
two main props of Hampton's glory. An 
oddly-assorted pan, indeed- thedelicate 

Italian painter, without a thought OUtside 
ol lus ail, and the bluff English place- 



7o 



UP THE THAMES. 



man, avid of nothing but honors and 
wealth. And the association of either of 
them with the spot is comparatively so 
slight. Wolsey held the ground for a few 
years, only by lease, built a mere fraction 
of the present edifice, and disappeared 
from the scene within half a generation. 
What it boasts, or boasted, of the other 
belongs to the least noted of his works — 
half a dozen sketches meant for stuff-pat- 
terns, and never intended to be preserved 
as pictures. Pictures they are, neverthe- 
less, and all the more valuable and sur- 
prising as manifesting such easy com- 
mand of hand and faculty, such a matter- 
of-course employment of the utmost re- 
sources of art on a production designed 
to have no continuing existence except 
as finished, rendered and given to the 
world by a "base mechanical," with no 
sense of art at all. 

Royalty, and the great generally, avail- 
ed themselves of their opportunities to 
select the finest locations and stake out the 
best claims along these shores. Of ele- 
vation there is small choice, a level sur- 
face prevailing. What there is has been 
generally availed of for park or palace, 
with manifest advantage to the landscape. 
The curves of the river are similarly uti- 



lized. Kew and Hampton occupy penin- 
sulas so formed. The latter, with Bushy 
Park, an appendage, fills a water-washed 
triangle of some two miles on each side. 
The southern angle is opposite Thames 
Ditton, a noted resort for brethren of the 
angle, with an ancient inn as popular, 
though not as stylish and costly, as the 
Star and Garter at Richmond. The town 
and palace of Hampton lie about half- 
way up the western side of the demesne. 
The view up and down the river from 
Hampton Bridge is one of the crack 
spectacles of the neighborhood. Satis- 
fied with it, we pass through the princi- 
pal street, with the Green in view to our 
left and Bushy Park beyond it, to the 
main entrance. This is part of the orig- 
inal palace as built by the cardinal. It 
leads into the first court. This, with the 
second or Middle Quadrangle, may all 
be ascribed to him, with some changes 
made by Henry VIII. and Christopher 
Wren. The colonnade of coupled Ionic 
pillars which runs across it on the south 
or right-hand side as you enter was de- 
signed by Wren. It is out of keeping 
with its Gothic surroundings. Standing 
beneath it, you see on the opposite side 
of the square Wolsey's Hall. It looks 




ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL, 



UP THE THAMES. 



71 




MIDDLE QUADRANGLE, HAMPTON COURT. 



like a church. The towers on either side 
of the gateway between the courts bear 
some relics of the old faith in the shape 
of terra-cotta medallions, portraits of the 
Roman emperors. These decorations 
were a present to the cardinal from Leo X. 
The oriel windows by their side bear con- 
tributions in a different taste from Henry 
VIII. They are the escutcheons of that 
monarch. The two popes, English and 
Italian, are well met. Our engravings 
give a good idea of the style of these 
parts of the edifice. The first or outer 
square is somewhat larger than the mid- 
dle one, which is a hundred and thirty- 
three feet across from north to south, and 
ninety-one in the opposite direction, or 
in a line with the longest side of the 
whole palace. 

A stairway beneath the arch leads to 
the great hall, one hundred and six feet 
by forty. This having been well furbish- 
ed recently, its aspect is probably little in- 
ferior in splendor to that which it wore in 
its first days. The open-timber roof, gay 
banners, stained windows and groups of 
armor bring mediaeval magnificence very 
freshiy before us. The ciphers and arms 
of Henry and his wife, Jane Seymour, 
are emblazoned on one of the windows, 
indicating the date of 1 536 or 1 537. Be- 
low them were graciously left Wolsey's 
imprint — his arms, with a cardinal's hat 
on each side, and the inscription, "The 



Lord Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal legat de 
Latere, archbishop of Yorke and chan- 
cellor of Englande." The tapestry of 
the hall illustrates sundry passages in 
the life of Abraham. A Flemish pupil 
of Raphael is credited with their execu- 
tion or design. 

This hall witnessed, certainly in the 
reign of George I., and according to tradi- 
tion in that of Elizabeth, the mimic repro- 
duction of the great drama with which it 
is associated. It is even said that Shake- 
speare took part here in his own play, 
King Henry VIII., or the Fall of Wol- 
sey. In 1558 the hall was resplendent 
with one thousand lamps, Philip and 
Mary holding their Christmas feast. The 
princess Elizabeth was a guest. The 
next morning she was compliant or po- 
litic enough to hear matins in the queen's 
closet. 

The Withdrawing Room opens from the 
hall. It is remarkable for its carved and 
illuminated ceiling of oak. Over the chim- 
ney is a portrait of Wolsey in profile on 
wood, not the least interesting of a long 
list of pictures which are a leading at- 
traction of the place. These are assem- 
bled, with few exceptions, in the third 
quadrangle, built in 1690. Into this we 
next pass. It takes the place of three of 
the five original courts, said to have been 
fully equal to the two which remain. 

The modern or Eastern Quadrangle 



72 



LP THE THAMES. 



is a hundred and ten by a 
hundred and seventeen feet. 
It is encircled by a colonnade 
like that in the middle square, 
and has nothing remarkable, 
architecturally, about it. In 
the public rooms that sur- 
round us there are, according 
to the catalogue, over a thou- 
sand pictures. Leonardo da 
Vinci, Paul Veronese, Titian. 
Giulio Romano, Murillo and 
a host of lesser names o( the 
Italian and Spanish schools, 
with still more of the Flem- 
ish, are represented. To 
most visitors, who may see 
elsewhere finer works by 
these masters, the chief at- 
traction of the walls is the 
series of original portraits by 
Holbein, Vandyck, l.ely and 
Kneller. The two full-lengths 
of Charles I. by Vandyck, on 
foot and on horseback, both 
widely known by engravings, 
are the gems of this depart- 
ment, as a Vandyck will al- 
ways be of any group of 
portraits. 

Days may be profitably and delight- 
fully spent in studying this fine collec- 
tion. The first men and women oi' Eng- 
land for three centuries handed down to 
us by the first artists she could command 
form a spectacle in which Americans can 
take a sort of home interest. Nearly all 
date before 1776, and we have a rightful 
share in them. Each head and each 
picture is a study. We have art and his- 
tory together. Familiar as we may be 
with the events with which the persons 
represented are associated, it is impos- 
sible to gaze upon their lineaments, set 
in the accessories of their day by the 
ablest hands guided by eyes that saw- 
below the surface, and not feel that we 
have new readings oi Uritish annals. 

Among the most ancient heads is a 
medallion of Henry VII. by Torregiano, 
the peppery and gifted Florentine who 
executed the marvelous chapel in West- 
minster Abbey and broke the nose of 
Michael Angelo. English art — or rather 




ARCHWAY IN HAMPTON COURT. 

ait in England — may be said to date from 
him. He could not create a school of 
artists in the island — the material did not 
exist — but the few productions he left 
there stood out so sharply from anything 




WOLSEY. 



UP THE THAMES. 



73 




PORTICO LEADING TO GARDENS. 



around them that the possessors of the 
wealth that was then beginning to accu- 
mulate employed it in drawing from the 
Continent additional treasures from the 
newly-found world of beauty. The riches 
of England have grown apace, and her 
collectors have used them liberally, if 
not always wisely, until her galleries, 
in time, have come to be sought by the 
connoisseurs, and even the artists, of the 
Continent. 

The last picture-gallery we traverse is 
the only one at Hampton Court special- 
ly built for its purpose ; and it is empty. 
This is the room erected by Sir Christo- 
pher Wren for the reception of the Car- 
toons. It leads us to the corridor that 
opens on the garden-front. We leave 
behind us, in addition to the state apart- 
ments, a great many others which are 



peopled by other in- 
habitants than the 
big spiders, said to 
be found nowhere 
else, known as car- 
dinals. The old 
palace is not kept 
wholly for show, but 
is made useful in 
the political econo- 
my of the kingdom 
by furnishing a re- 
treat to impecuni- 
ous members of the 
oligarchy. Certain 
families of distress- 
ed aristocrats are 
harbored here — 
clearly a more wholesome arrangement 
than letting them take their chance in the 
world and bring discredit on their class. 
Emerging on the great gardens, forty 
four acres in extent, we find ourselves on 
broad walks laid out with mathematical 
regularity, and edged by noble masses 
of yew, holly, horse-chestnut, etc. almost 
as rectangular and circular. We are here 
struck with the great advantage derived 
in landscape gardening from the rich va- 
riety of large evergreens possible in the 
climate of Britain. The holly, unknown 
as an outdoor plant in this country north 
of Philadelphia, is at home in the north 
of Scotland, eighteen degrees nearer the 
pole. We are more fortunate with the 
Conifers, many of the finest of which 
family are perfectly hardy here. But we 
miss the deodar cedar, the redwood and 




CENTRE AVENUE. 



"4 



IT THE THAMES. 




W ash i ngto nia 
of California, and 
the cedar of Leb- 
anon. These, 
unless perhaps 
the last, cannot 
be depended on 
much n orth of 
the latitude of the 
Magnolia gran- 
T h e y 
thrive all over 
England, with 
others almost as 
beautiful, and as 
delicate north of 

the Delaware. Of the laurel tribe, also 
hardy in England, our Northern States 
have but a few weakly representatives. 
So with the Rhododcndra. 

When, tired of even so charming a 
scene of arboreal luxury, we knock at 
the Flower-Pot gate to the left of the pal- 
ace, and are admitted into 
the private garden, we make 
the acquaintance of another 
stately stranger we have had 
the honor at home of meet- 
ing only under glass. This is 
the great vine, ninety years 
or a hundred old, of the 
Black Hamburg variety. It 
does not cover as much 
space as the Carolina Scup- 
pernong — the native variety 
that so surprised and de- 
lighted Raleigh's Roanoke 
Island settlers in i 5S5 — often 
does. But its bunches, some- 
times two or three thousand 
in number, are much larger 
than the Scuppernong's little 
clumps of two or three. They 
weigh something like a pound 
each, and are thought worthy 
of being reserved for Victo- 
ria's dessert. Her own fam- 
ily vine has burgeoned so 
broadly that three thousand 
po mils. o\ grapes would not 
be a particularly large dish 
for a Christmas dinner for 
the united Guelphs. 

We must not forget the 



HAMPTON COURT — GARDEN FRONT. 



Labyrinth, "a mighty maze, but not with- 
out a plan," that has bewildered genera- 
tions of young and old children since the 
time of its creator, William of Orange. 
It is a feature of the Dutch style of land- 
scape gardening imprinted by him upon 
the Hampton grounds. He failed to im- 




GATE TO PRIVATE GARDEN. 



UP THE THAMES. 



75 




BUSHY PARK. 



press a like stamp upon that chaos of 
queer, shapeless and contradictory means 
to beneficent ends.the British constitution. 
Hampton Court, notwithstanding the 
naming of the third quadrangle the Foun- 
tain Court, and the prominence given to 
a fountain in the design of the principal 
grounds, is not rich in waterworks. Na- 
ture has done a good deal for it in that 
way, the Thames embracing it on two 
sides and the lowness of the flat site 
placing water within easy reach every- 
where. This superabundance of the ele- 
ment did not content the magnificent 
Wolsey. He was a man of great ideas, 
and to secure a head for his jets he sought 
an elevated spring at Combe Wood, more 
than two miles distant. To bring this 
supply he laid altogether not less than 
eight miles of leaden pipe weighing twen- 
ty-four pounds to the foot, and passing 
under the bed of the Thames. Reduced 
to our currency of to-day, these conduits 
must have cost nearly half a million of 
dollars. They do their work yet, the 
gnawing tooth of old Edax rcrum not 
having penetrated far below the surface 
of the earth. Better hydraulic results 
would now be attained at a consider- 
ably reduced cost by a steam-engine and 
stand-pipe. At the beginning of the six- 
teenth century this motor was not even 
in embryo, unless we accept the story of 



Blasco de Garay's steamer that manoeu- 
vred under the eye of Charles V. as fruit- 
lessly as Fitch's and Fulton's before 
Napoleon. Coal, its dusky pabulum, was 
also practically a stranger on the upper 
Thames. The ancient fire-dogs that were 
wont to bear blazing billets hold their 
places in the older part of the palace. 

Crossing the Kingston road, which 
runs across the peninsula and skirts 
the northern boundary of Hampton Park, 
we get into its continuation, Bushy Park. 
This is larger than the chief enclosure, 
but less pretentious. We cease to be 
oppressed by the palace and its excess 
of the artificial. The great avenues of 
horse-chestnut, five in number, and run- 
ning parallel with a length of rather more 
than a mile and an aggregate breadth of 
nearly two hundred yards, are formal 
enough in design, but the mass of foliage 
gives them the effect of a wood. They 
lead nowhere in particular, and are flank- 
ed by glades and copses in which the 
genuinely rural prevails. Cottages gleam 
through the trees. The lowing of kine, 
the tinkling of the sheep-bell, the gabble 
of poultry, lead you away from thoughts 
of prince and city. Deer domesticated 
here since long before the introduction 
of the turkey or the guinea-hen bear 
themselves with as quiet ease and free- 
dom from fear as though they were the 



76 



UP THE THAMES. 



lords of the manor and held the black- 
letter title-deeds for the delicious stretch 
of sward over which they troop. Less 
stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes 
are the hares, lineal descendants of those 
which gave sport to Oliver Cromwell. 
When that grim Puritan succeeded to 
the lordship of the saintly cardinal, he 
was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and 
Irish indulged him with a brief chance 
to doff his buff coat, to take relaxation 
in coursing. We loiter by the margin of 
the ponds he dug in the hare-warren, and 
which were presented as nuisances by the 
grand jury in 1662. The complaint was 
that by turning the water of the " New 
River" into them the said Oliver had 
made the road from Hampton Wick bog- 
gy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor 
of the deceased was at the same time 
and in like manner denounced. This 
was the stopping up of the pathway 
through the warren. The palings were 
abated, and the path is open to all nine- 
teenth-century comers, as it probably will 
be to those of the twentieth, this being 
a land of precedent, averse to change. 
We may stride triumphantly across the 
location of the Cromwellian barricades, 
and not the less so, perhaps, for certain 
other barricades which he helped to erect 
in the path of privilege. 

Directing our steps to the left, or west- 
ward, we again reach the river at the 
town of Hampton. It is possessed of 
pretty water-views, but of little else of 
note except the memory and the house 



of Garrick. Hither the great actor, after 
positively his last night on the stage, re- 
tired, and settled the long contest for his 
favor between the Muses of Tragedy and 
Comedy by inexorably turning his back 
on both. He did not cease to be the de- 
light of polished society, thanks to his 
geniality and to riterary and conversa- 
tional powers capable of making him the 
intimate of Johnson and Reynolds. More 
fortunate in his temperament and temper 
than his modern successor, Macready, he 
never fretted that his profession made 
him a vagabond by act of Parliament, 
or that his adoption of it in place of the 
law had prevented his becoming, by virtue 
of the same formal and supreme stamp, 
the equal of the Sampson Brasses plen- 
tiful in his day as in ours among their 
betters of that honorable vocation. His 
self-respect was of tougher if not sound- 
er grain. "Worth makes the man, and 
want of it the fellow," was the motto sup- 
plied him by his friend and neighbor, 
Pope, but obeyed long before he saw it 
in the poetic form. 

Garrick's house is separated from its 
bit of "grounds," which run down to the 
water's edge, by the highway. It com- 
municates with them by a tunnel, sug- 
gested by Johnson. It was not a very 
novel suggestion, but the excavation de- 
serves notice as probably the one engi- 
neering achievement of old Ursus major. 
We may fancy the Titan of the pen and 
the tea-table, in his snuffy habit as he 
lived and as photographed by Boswell, 




garrick's villa. 



UP THE THAMES. 



77 




RIVER SCKNE, THAMES DITTON. 



Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and their epi- 
tomizer Macaulay, diving under the turn- 
pike and emerging among the osiers and 
water-rats to offer his orisons at the shrine 
of Shakespeare. For, in the fashion of 
the day, Garrick erected a little brick 
"temple," and placed therein a statue of 
the man it was the study of his life to 
interpret. The temple is there yet. The 
statue, a fine one by Roubillac, now 
adorns the hall of the British Museum, 
a much better place for it. Garrick, and 
not Shakespeare, is the genius loci. 

This is but one, if the most striking, 
of a long row of villas that overlook the 
river, each with its comfortable-looking 
and rotund trees and trim plat in front, 
with sometimes a summer-house snug- 
gling down to the ripples. These river- 
side colonies, thrown out so rapidly by 
the metropolis, have no colonial look. 
We cannot associate the idea of a new 
settlement with rich turf, graveled walks 
and large trees devoid of the gaunt and 
forlorn look suggestive of their fellows' 
having been hewn away from their side. 
The houses have some of the pertness, 
rawness and obtrusiveness of youth, but 
;t is not the youth of the backwoods. 

Bob and ?ir.ker are in their glory here- 
abouts. Fishing-rods in the season and 
good weather form an established part 
of the scenery. From the banks of the 
stream, from the islands and from box- 
like boats called punts in the middle of 
the water, their slender arches project. 



It becomes a source of speculation how 
the breed of fish is kept up. Seth Green 
has never operated on the Thames. Were 
he to take it under his wing, a sum in the 
single rule of three points to the conclu- 
sion that all London would take its seat 
under these willows and extract ample 
sustenance from the invisible herds. If 
perch and dace can hold their own against 
the existing pressure and escape extinc- 
tion, how would they multiply with the 
fostering aid of thespawning-box ! We 
are not deep in the mysteries of the an- 
gle, but we believe English waters do not 
boast the catfish. They ought to acquire 
him. He is almost as hard to extirpate 
as the perch, would be quite at home in 
these sluggish pools under the lily-pads, 
and would harmonize admirably with the 
eel in the pies and other gross prepara- 
tions which delight the British palate. 
He hath, moreover, a John Bull-like air 
in his broad and burly shape, his smooth 
and unscaly superficies and the noli-me- 
tangere character of his dorsal fin. Pity 
he was unknown to Izaak Walton ! 

At this particular point the piscatory 
effect is intensified by the dam just above 
Hampton Bridge. Two parts of a river 
are especially fine for fishing. One is 
the part above the dam, and the other 
the part below. These two divisions may 
be said, indeed, in a large sense to cover 
all the Thames. Moulsey Lock, while 
favorable to fish and fishermen, is un- 
favorable to dry land. Yet there is said 



78 



UP THE THAMES. 



to be no malaria. 
Hampton Court has 
proved a wholesome 
residence to every oc- 
cupant save its founder. 

The angler's capital 
is Thames Ditton, and 
his capitol the Swan 
Inn. Ditton is, like 
many other pretty Eng- 
lish villages, little and 
old. It is mentioned ^^F 
in Domesday Boke as &S 
belonging to the bish- 
op of Bayeux in Nor- 
mandy, famous for the 
historic piece of tapes- 
try. Wadard, a gen- 
tleman with a Saxon 
name, held it of him, 
probably for the quit - rent of an annual 
eel-pie, although the consideration is not 
stated. The clergy were, by reason of 
their frequent meagre days and seasons, 
great consumers of fish. The phosphor- 
escent character of that diet may have 
contributed, if we accept certain mod- 
ern theories of animal chemistry as con- 
nected in some as yet unexplained way 
with psychology, to the intellectual pre- 
dominance of that class of the popula- 
tion in the Middle Ages. That occasion- 
al fasting, whether voluntary and system- 
atic as in the cloisters, or involuntary and 
altogether the reverse of systematic in 
Grub street, helps to clear the wits, with 
or without the aid of phosphorus, is a 
fixed fact. The stomach is apt to be a 
stumbling - block to the brain. We are 
not orone to associate prolonged and pro- 
ductive mental effort with a fair round 
belly with fat capon lined. It was not 
the jolly clerics we read of in song, but 
the lean ascetic brethren who were nu- 
merous enough to balance them, that 
garnered for us the treasures of ancient 
literature and kept the mind of Christen- 
dom alive, if only in a state of suspended 
animation. It was something that they 
prevented the mace of chivalry from ut- 
terly braining humankind. 

The Thames is hereabouts joined from 
the south by a somewhat exceptional style 
of river, characterized by Milton as "the 




WOLSEV'S TOWER, ESHER. 

sullen Mole, that runneth underneath," 
and by Pope, in dutiful imitation, as "the 
sullen Mole that hides his diving flood." 
Both poets play on the word. In our 
judgment, Milton's line is the better, 
since moles do not dive and have no 
flood — two false figures in one line from 
the precise and finical Pope ! Thomson 
contributes the epithet of "silent," which 
will do well enough as far as it goes, 
though devoid even of the average force 
of Jamie. But, as we have intimated, it 
is a queer river. Pouring into the Thames 
by several mouths that deviate over quite 
a delta, its channel two or three miles 
above is destitute in dry seasons of 
water. Its current disappears under an 
elevation called White Hill, and does not 
come again to light for almost two miles, 
resembling therein several streams in 
the United States, notably Lost River in 
North-eastern Virginia, which has a sub- 
terranean course of the same character 
and about the same length, but has not 
yet found its Milton or Pope, far superior 
as it is to its English cousin in natural 
beauty. 

For this defect art and association am- 
ply atone. On the southern side of the 
Mole, not far from the underground por- 
tion of its course — "the Swallow" as it 
is called — stand the charming and storied 
seats of Esher and Claremont. 

Esher was an ancient residence of the 



UP THE THAMES. 



79 



bishops of Winchester. Wolsey made 
it for a time his retreat after being ousted 
from Hampton Court. A retreat it was 
to him in every sense. He dismissed his 
servants and all state, and cultivated the 
deepest despondency. His inexorable 
master, however, looked down on him, 
from his ravished towers hard by, un- 
moved, and, as the sequel in a few years 
proved, unsatisfied in his greed. Gar- 
diner, bishop of Winchester, was called 
upon for a contribution. He loyally sur- 
rendered to the king the whole estate of 
Esher, a splendid mansion with all ap- 
purtenances and a park a mile in diam- 
eter. Henry annexed Esher to Hamp- 
ton Court, and continued his research for 
new subjects of spoliation. His daugh- 
ter Mary gave Esher back to the see of 
Winchester. Elizabeth bought it and 
bestowed it on Lord Howard of Effing- 
ham, who well earned it by his services 
against the Armada. Of the families 
who subsequently owned the place, the 
Pelhams are the most noted. Now it 
has passed from their hands. That which 
has alone been preserved of the palace 
of Wolsey is an embattled gatehouse that 
looks into the sluggish Mole, and joins it 
mayhap in musing over "the days that 
we have seen." 

Claremont, its next neighbor, unites, 
with equal or greater charms of land- 
scape, in preaching the old story of the 



decadence of the great. Lord Clive, the 
Indian conqueror and speculator, built 
the house from the designs of Capability 
Browne at a cost of over a hundred thou- 
sand pounds. His dwelling and his monu- 
ment remain to represent Clive. After 
him, two or three occupants removed, 
came Leopold of Belgium, with his bride, 
the Princess Charlotte, pet and hope of 
the British nation. Their stay was more 
transient still — a year only, when death 
dissipated their dream and cleared the 
way to the throne for Victoria. Leopold 
continued to hold the property, and it 
became a generation later the asylum 
of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind 
the miseries of any one condemned to 
make this lovely spot his home are not 
apt to present themselves as the acme of 
despair. A sensation of relief and lull- 
ing repose would be more reasonably ex- 
pected, especially after so stormy a career 
as that of Louis. The change from rest- 
less and capricious Paris to dewy shades 
and luxurious halls in the heart of change- 
less and impregnable England ought, on 
common principles, to have promoted 
the content and prolonged the life of the 
old king. Possibly it did, but if so, the 
French had not many months' escape 
from a second Orleans regency, for the 
exile's experience of Claremont was brief. 
We may wander over his lawns, and re- 
shape to ourselves his reveries. Then 




CLAREMONT. 



8o 



UP THE THAMES. 



we may forget the man who lost 
an empire as we look up at the 
cenotaph of him who conquered 
one. Both brought grist to Miller 
Bull, the fortunate and practical- 
minded owner of such vast water- 
privileges. His water-power 
seems proof against all floods, 
while the corn of all nations must 
come to his door. Standing under 
these drooping elms, by this lazy 
stream, we hear none of the clat- 
ter of the great mill, and we cease 
to dream of affixing a period to 
its noiseless and effective work. 

If we are not tired of parks for to- 
day, rive minutes by rail will car- 
ry us west to Oatlands Park, with 
its appended, and more or less de- 
pendent, village of Walton-upon- 
Thames. But a surfeit even of . ; 

English country-houses and their 
pleasances is a possible thing; 
and nowhere are they more abundant 
than within an hour's walk of our pres- 
ent locality. So, taking Ashley Park, 
Burwood Park, Pains Hill and many 
others, as well as the Coway Stakes — 
said by one school of antiquarians to 
have been planted in the Thames by 
Cassar, and by another to be the relics 
of a fish -weir — Walton Church and 
Bradshaw's house, for granted, we shall 
turn to the east and finish the purlieus 
of Hampton with a glance at the old 
Saxon town of Kingston - on - Thames. 
Probably an ardent Kingstonian would in- 
dignantly disown the impression our three 
words are apt to give of the place. It is 
a rapidly - growing town, and " Egbert, 
the first king of all England," who held 
a council at " Kyningestun, famosa ilia 
locus," in 838, would be at a loss to find 
his way through its streets could he re- 
visit it. It has the population of a Saxon 
county. Viewed from the massive bridge, 
with the church-tower rising above an 
expanse of sightly buildings, it possesses 
the least possible resemblance to the 
cluster of wattled huts that may be pre- 
sumed to have sheltered Egbert and his 
peers. 

A more solid memento of the Saxons 
is preserved in the King's Stone. This 




CL1VES MONUMENT. 

has been of late years set up in the cen- 
tre of the town, surrounded with an iron 
railing, and made visible to all comers, 
skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits 
it with having been that upon which the 
kings of Wessex were crowned, as those 
of Scotland down to Longshanks, and 
after him the English, were on the red 
sandstone palladium of Scone. From 
the list of ante-Norman monarchs said 
to have received the sceptre upon it 




PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 



UP THE THAMES. 



hi 




WALTON CHURCH. 

the poetically inclined visitor will select 
for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation 
was celebrated in great state in his sev- 
enteenth year. How he fell in love with 
and married secretly his cousin 
Elgiva ; how Saint Dunstan and 
his equally saintly though not 
regularly beatified ally.Odo, 
archbishop of Canterbury, in- 
dignant at a step taken against 
their fulminations and protests, 
and jealous of the fair queen, 
tore her from his arms, burnt 
with hot iron the bloom out of 
her cheeks, and finally put her 
to death with the most cruel 
tortures ; and how her broken- 
hearted boy-lord, dethroned and 
hunted, died before reaching 
twenty, — is a standing dish of 
the pathetic. Unfortunately, 
the story, handed down to us 
with much detail, appears to be 
true. We must not accept it, 
however, as an average illus- 
tration of life in that age of 
England. The five hundred 
years before the Conquest do 
not equal, in the bloody cha- 
racter of their annals, the like 
period succeeding it. Barbar- 
ous enough the Anglo-Saxons 



were, but wanton 
cruelty does not 
seem to have been 
one of their traits. 
Toproduceitsome 
access of religious 
fury was usually 
requisite. It was 
on the church- 
doors that the 
skins of their Da- 
nish invaders were 
nailed. 

Kingston has no 
more Dunstans. 
Alexandra would 
be perfectly safe in 
its market-place. 
The rosy maidens 
who pervade its 
streets need not 
envy her cheeks, 
and the saints and archbishops who are 
to officiate at her husband's induction as 
head of the Anglican Church have thei v 
anxieties at present directed to whollv 




— * ?**Z-P~ —■ ^*- '-■■■ ■' 

KINGSTON CHURCH. 



82 



UP THE THAMES. 



different quarters. They have foes with- 
in and foes without, but none in the pal- 
ace. 

Kingston bids fair to revert, after a 
sort, to the metropolitan position it boast- 
ed once, but has lost for nine centuries. 
The capital is coming to it, and will cov- 
er the four remaining miles within a dec- 
ade or two at the existing rate of progress. 
Kingston may be assigned to the suburbs 
already. It is much nearer London, in 
point of time, than Union Square in New 
York to the City Hall. A slip of country 
not yet endowed with trottoirs and gas- 
lamps intervenes. Call this park, as you 
do the square miles of such territory al- 
ready deep within the metropolis. 

London's jurisdiction, as marked by 
the Boundary Stone, extends much 
farther up the river than we have as 
yet gone. Nor are the swans her only 
vicegerents. The myrmidons of Inspect- 
or Bucket, foot and horse, supplement 
those natatory representatives. So do 



the municipalities encroach upon and 
overspread the country, as it is eminent- 
ly proper they should, seeing that to the 
charters so long ago exacted, and so 
long and so jealously guarded, by the 
towns, so much of the liberty enjoyed 
by English - speaking peoples is due. 
Large cities may be under some circum- 
stances, according to an often -quoted 
saying, plague-spots on the body politic, 
but their growth has generally been com- 
mensurate with that of knowledge and 
order, and indicative of anything but 
a diseased condition of the national or- 
ganism. 

But here we are, under the shadow of 
the departed Nine Elms and of the official 
palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lun- 
non to satisfy the proudest Cockney, in 
less time than we have taken in getting 
off that last commonplace on political 
economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson 
never undertook to meditate at thirty-five 
miles an hour. 




UP THE THAMES. 

CONCLUDING PAPER. 




WINDSOR CASTLE, KROM ETON. 



LET our demonstration to-day be on 
the monarchical citadel of Eng- 
land, the core and nucleus of her kingly 
associations, her architectural eikon ba- 
sili/ce, Windsor. To reach the famous 
castle it will not do to lounge along the 
river. We must cut loose from the sub- 
urbs of the suburbs, and launch into a 
more extended flight. Our destination 
is nearly an hour distant by rail ; and 
though it does not take us altogether out 
of sight of the city, it leads us among 
real farms and genuine villages, tilled 
and inhabited as they have been since 
the Plantagenets, instead of market-gar- 
dens and villas. 

We go to Paddington and try the 
Great Western, the parent of the broad 
gauges with no very numerous family, 
Erie being one of its unfortunate chil- 
dren. That six-foot infant is not up to 
the horizontal stature of its seven-foot 
progenitor, but has still sixteen inches 
too many to fare well in the contest with 
its little, active, and above all numerous, 
foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch 



"persuasion." The English and the 
American giants can sympathize with 
each other. Both have drained the bit- 
ter cup that is tendered by a strong ma- 
jority to a weak minority. Neither the 
American nor the British constitution, 
with their whole admirable array of 
checks and balances, has shielded them 
from this evil. In the battle of the 
gauges both have gone to the wall, and 
will stay there until they can muster 
strength enough to reel over into the 
ranks of their enemies. 

This relative debility is, at the same 
time, more apparent to the stockholders 
than to their customers. The superstruc- 
ture and "plant" of the Erie has lately 
stood interested inspection from abroad 
with great credit, and that of the Great 
Western is unexceptionable. The vote 
of travelers may be safely allotted to the 
broad gauge. They have more elbow 
room. The carriages attain the requisite 
width without unpleasantly, not to say 
dangerously, overhanging the centre of 
gravity; and, other things equal, the 
83 



s 4 



UP THE THAMES. 



movement is steadier. Nor is the finan- 
cial aspect of the question apt to impress 
gloomily the tourist as he enters the Pad- 
ding-ton station and looks around at its 
blaze of polychrome and richness of dec- 
oration generally. As the coach doors 
are slammed upon you, the guard steps 
into his "van," the vast drivers, taller 
than your head plus the regulation stove- 
pipe, slowly begin their whirl, and you 
roll majestically forth through a long 
file of liveried servants of the company, 
drawn up or in action on the platform, 
the sensation of patronizing a poverty- 
stricken corporation is by no means like- 
ly to harass you. You cease to realize 
that the Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur 
Brunei, made a disastrous mistake in the 
design of this splendid highway, and that, 
as some will have it, it was his Moscow. 
His error, if one there was, existed only 
in the selection of the width of track. 
Whatever the demerits of the design in 
that one particular, the execution is in 
all above praise. The road was his pet. 
Once finished, it was his delight, as with 
the breeder of a fine horse, to mount it 
and try its mettle. Over and again would 
he occupy the footboard between London 
and Bristol, and rejoice as a strong man 
in running his race at close to seventy 
miles an hour. He and Stephenson 
were capital types of the Gaul and Brit- 
on, striving side by side on the same 
field, as it will be good for the world that 
they should ever do. 

Combats of another character — in fact, 



of two other characters — recur to our re- 
flections as we find that we have shuffled 
off the coil of bricks and mortar and are 
rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More 
fortunate than some who have been there 
before us, we have no call to alight. 
Calls to this ancient field of glory, whe- 
ther symbolized by the gentlemanly pis- 
tol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be 
in vogue. Dueling and boxing are both 
frowned down effectually, one by public 
opinion and the other by the police. It 
is only of late years that they finally suc- 
cumbed to those twin discouragers ; but 
it seems altogether improbable that the 
ordeal by combat in either shape will 
again come to the surface in a land 
where tilting-spear and quarter-staff were 
of old so rife. In France chivalry still 
asserts, in a feeble way, the privilege of 
winking and holding out its iron, and 
refuses to be comforted with a suit for 
damages. 

Southall, a station or two beyond, sug- 
gests sport of a less lethal character, 
being an ancient meeting-place for the 
queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may 
have collected here some of his studies 
of Cockney equestrianism. The sports- 
men so dear to his pencil furnished him 
wealth of opportunities on their annual 
concourse at the cart's tail. The un- 
loading of the animal, his gathering him- 
self up for a leisurely canter across coun- 
try, the various styles antl degrees of 
horsemanship among his lumbering fol- 
lowers, and the business-like replacing 




HORTON CHURCH. 



UP THE THAMES. 



85 




■Ms. <j$ 

MILTON'S PEAR TREE. 

of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled 
away for another day's sport, served as 
the most complete travesty imaginable 
of the chase. It has the compensation 
of placing a number of worthy men in the 
saddle at least once in the year and com- 
pelling them to do some rough riding. 
The English have always made it their 
boast that they are more at home on 
horseback than any other European na- 
tion, and they claim to have derived 
much military advantage from it. Le- 
ver's novels would lose many of their 
best situations but for this national ac- 
complishment and the astounding de- 
velopment it reaches in his hands. 

To the left lies the fine park of Os- 
terley, once the seat of the greatest of 
London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas 
Gresham. An improvement proposed by 
Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 
1578, does not speak highly for her taste 
in design. She remarked that in her 
opinion the court in front of the house 
would look better split up by a wall. 
Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, 
and surprised Her Majesty next morn- 
ing by pointing out the wall which he 
had erected during the night, sending to 
London for masons and material for the 
purpose. The conceit was a more pon- 
derous one than that of Raleigh's cloak 
— bricks and mortar versus velvet. 

A greater than Gresham succeeded, 



after the death of his widow, to the oc- 
cupancy of Osterley — Chief-justice Coke. 
His compliment to Elizabeth on the oc- 
casion of a similar visit to the same 
house took the more available and ac- 
ceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred 
pounds sterling in jewelry. She had 
more than a woman's weakness for 
finery, and Coke operated upon it very 
successfully. His gems outlasted Gresh- 
am's wall, which has long since disap- 
peared with the court it disfigured. In 
place of both stands a goodly Ionic por- 
tico, through which one may pass to a 
staircase that bears a representation by 
Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Mot- 
ley's hero, William the Silent. The gal- 
lery offers a collection of other old pic- 
tures. Should we, however, take time 
for even a short stop in this vicinity, it 
would probably be for the credit of say- 
ing that we walked over Hounslow Heath 
intact in purse and person. The gen- 
tlemen of the road live only in the clas- 
sic pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, 
if we may include Sam Weller in such 
worshipful company, that bard of "the 
bold Turpz'n." Another class of high- 
waymen had long before them been also 
attracted by the fine manoeuvring facili- 
ties of the heath, beginning with the army 
of the Caesars and ending with that of 
James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry 
men were saints to Kirke and his lambs. 
Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's 
outlying manors, in his time the seat of 
his friend Bathurst and the haunt of 
Addison, Prior, Congreve and Gay, and 
leave southward, toward the Thames, 
Horton, the cradle of Milton. A mar- 
ble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to 
the memory of his mother, ob. 1637. At 
Horton were composed, or inspired, Ly- 
cidas, L Allegro, II Penseroso, Cotnus and 
others of his nominally minor but real- 
ly sweetest and most enjoyable poems. 
In this retirement the Muse paid him 
her earliest visits, before he had thrown 
himself away on politics or Canaanitish 
mythology. Peeping in upon his hand- 
some young face in its golden setting of 
blonde curls, 

Through the sweetbrier or the vine. 
Or the twisted eglantine, 



86 



UP THE THAMES. 



she wooed him to better work than re- 
porting the debates of the archangels or 
calling the roll of Tophet. Had he con- 
fined himself to this tenderer field, the 
world would have been the gainer. He 
might not have " made the word Miltonic 
mean sublime," but we can spare a little 
of the sublime to get some more of the 
beautiful. 

To reach Milton, however, we have 
run off of the track badly. His Eden is 
no station on the Great Western. We 
shall balance this southward divergence 
with a corresponding one to the north 
from Slough, the last station ere reach- 
ing Windsor. We may give a go-by for 
the moment to the halls of kings, do 
homage to him who treated them sim- 
ilarly, and point, in preference, to where, 

in many a mouldering heap, 
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. 

They show Gray's tomb at Stoke Pogis 
church, and his house, West End Cot- 
tage, half a mile distant. The ingredi- 
ents of his Elegy — actually the greatest, 
but in his judgment among the least, of 
his few works — exist all around. " The 
rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower," 
and "the yew tree's shade," the most 
specific among the simple " properties " 
of his little spectacle, are common to so 
many places that there are several com- 
petitors for the honor of having furnish- 
ed them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds 
and owls cannot, of course, at this late 
day be identified. Gray could not have 
done it himself. He drew from general 
memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit 
on his thumb-nail from chance-met ob- 
jects as he went along. Had his con- 
ception and rendering of the theme been 
due to the direct impression upon his 
mind of its several aspects and constitu- 
ents, he would have more thoroughly ap- 
preciated his work. He could not un- 
derstand its popularity, any more than 
Campbell could that of Ye Mariners of 
England, which he pronounced "d — d 
drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray used 
to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," 
that the Elegy "owed its popularity en- 
tirely to the subject, and the public would 
have received it as well had it been writ- 
ten entirely in prose." Had it been writ- 




ten in prose or in the inventory style 
of poetry, it would have been forgotten 
long ago, like so much else of that 
kind. 

Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which 
gave a home to Burke and a title to the 
wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to 
a peerage that the haughty Israelite, 
soured by a life of struggle against peers 
and their prejudices, would deign to ac- 
cept. We know it will be objected to 
this remark that Disraeli is, and has 
been for most of his career, associated 
with Toryism. But that was part of his 
game. A man of culture, thought and 
fastidious taste, he would, had he been 
of the sangre azul, have been the stead- 
iest and sincerest of Conservatives. Priv- 
ilege would have been his gospel. As it 
is, it has only been his weapon, to use 
in fighting for himself. "The time will 
come when you shall listen to me," were 
his words when he was first coughed 
down. The time has come. The most 
cynical of premiers, he governs England, 
and he scorns to take a place among those 
who ruled her before him. 

Extending our divergence farther west 
toward "Cliefden's proud alcove, the bow- 
er of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we 
find ourselves in a luxuriant rolling coun- 
try, rural and slumberous. Cookham 
parish, which we should traverse, claims 
quite loudly American kinship on the 
strength of its including an estate once 
the property of Henry Washington, who 
is alleged, without sufficient ground, to 
have been a relative of the general. But 



UP THE THAMES. 



87 



+H4F* 







BEACONSFIELD CHURCH. 



we are within the purlieus of Windsor. 
The round tower has been looking down 
upon us these many miles, and we can- 
not but yield to its magnetism. 

Eton, on the north bank, opposite 
Windsor, and really a continuous town 
with that which nestles close to the cas- 
tle walls, is on our way from Slough. 
The red-brick buildings of the school, 
forming a fine foil to the lighter-colored 
and more elegantly designed chapel, are 
on our left, the principal front looking 
over a garden toward the river and Wind- 
sor Home Park beyond. We become 
aware of a populace of boys, the file- 
closers of England's nineteenth century 
worthies, and her coming veterans of the 
twentieth. We may contemplatively 
view them in that light, but it has little 




TOMB OF BURKE. 



I place in their reflections. Their ruddy 
faces and somewhat cumbrous forms 
belong to the animal period of life that 
links together boyhood, colthood and 
calfhood. Education of the physique, 
consisting chiefly in the indulgence and 
employment of it in the mere demonstra- 
tion of its superabundant vitality, is a 
large part of the curriculum at English 
schools. The playground and the study- 
room form no unequal alliance. Rigid 
as, in some respects, the discipline prop- 
er of the school may be, it does not com- 
pare with the severity of that maintained 
by the older boys over the younger ones. 
The code of the lesser, and almost inde- 
pendent, republic of the dormitory and 
the green is as clear in its terms as that 
of the unlimited monarchy of the school- 
room, and more potent in shaping the 
character. The lads train themselves 
for the battle of the world, with some 
help from the masters. It is a sound 
system on the whole, if based, to appear- 
ance, rather too much on the principle 
of the weaker to the wall. The tenden- 
cy of the weaker inevitably is to the wall ; 
and if he is to contend against it effective- 
ly, it will be by finding out his weakness 
and being made to feel it at the earliest 
possible moment. 

Not on land only, but on the river, 
whereinto it so gradually blends, does 
lush young England dissipate. Cricket 
and football order into violent action 



88 



UP THE THAMES. 



both pairs of extremities, while the upper 
pair and the organs of the thorax labor 
profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its 
three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny 
Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead, 
where Falstaff overflowed the buck-bas- 
ket, belongs to the boys. In this space 
it is split into an archipelago of aits. In 
and out of the gleaming paths and ave- 
nues of silvery water that wind between 
them glide the little boats. The young 
Britons take to the element like young 
ducks. Many a "tall ammiral" has com- 
menced his "march over the mountain 
wave" among these water-lilies and 
hedges of osier. 

Shall we leave the boys at play, and, 
renewing our youth, go ourselves to 
school ? Entering the great gate of the 
western of the two quadrangles, we are 
welcomed by a bronze statue of the found- 
er of the institution, Henry VI. He en- 
dowed it in 1440. The first organization 
comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten 
priests, six choristers, twenty -five poor 
grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor 
infirm men to pray for the king." The 
prayers of these invalids were sorely 
needed by the unhappy scion of Lancas- 
ter, but did him little good in a temporal 
sense. The provost is always rector of 
the parish. Laymen are non-eligible. 
Thus it happens that the list does not in- 
clude two names which would have illu- 



minated it more than those of any of the 
incumbents — Boyle the philosopher, "fa- 
ther of chemistry and brother of the earl 
of Cork," and Waller the poet. The 
modern establishment consists of a pro- 
vost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master, 
under-master, assistants, seventy founda- 
tion scholars, seven lay clerks and ten 
choristers, with a cortege of " inferior 
officers and servants" — a tolerably full 
staff. The pay-students, as they would 
be termed in this country, numbering 
usually five to six hundred, do not live 
in the college precincts, but at boarding- 
houses in the town, whence their desig- 
nation of oppidans, the seventy gowns- 
men only having dormitories in the col- 
lege. The roll of the alumni contains 
such names as the first earl of Chatham, 
Harley, earl of Oxford, Bolingbroke, Fox, 
Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. 
That is enough to say for Eton. The 
beauties of the chapel, the treasures of 
the library and the other shows of the 
place become trivial by the side of the 
record. 

Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which 
has but three or four arches, we pass to 
the town of Windsor, which crouches, on 
the river-side, close up to the embattled 
walls of the castle — so closely that the 
very irregular pile of buildings included 
in the latter cannot at first glance be 
well distinguished from the town. High 




HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES. 



UP THE THAMES. 



80 




ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL. 



over all swells the round tower to a height 
above the water of two hundred and 
twenty feet — no excessive altitude, if we 
deduct the eminence on which it stands, 
yet enough, in this level country, to give 
it a prospect of a score or two of miles 
in all directions. The Conqueror fell in 
love with the situation at first sight, and 
gave a stolen monastery in exchange for 
it. The home so won has provided a 
shelter — at times very imperfect, indeed 
— to British sovereigns for eight centu- 
ries. From the modest erection of Wil- 
liam it has been steadily growing — with 
the growth of the empire, we were near 
saying, but its chief enlargements occur- 
red before the empire entered upon the 
expansion of the past three centuries. It 
is more closely associated with Edward 
III. than with any other of the ancient 
line. He was born at Windsor, and al- 
most entirely rebuilt it, William of Wyke- 
ham being superintending architect, with 
"a fee of one shilling a day whilst at 
Windsor, and two shillings when he went 
elsewhere on the duties of his office," 
three shillings a week being the pay of 
his clerk. It becomes at once obvious 
that the margin for "rings" was but slen- 
der in those days. The labor question 
gave not the least trouble. The law of 
supply and demand was not consulted. 
"Three hundred and sixty workmen 



were impressed, to be employed on the 
building at the king's wages ; some of 
whom having clandestinely left Windsor 
and engaged in other employments to 
greater advantage, writs were issued pro- 
hibiting all persons from employing them 
on pain of forfeiting all their goods and 
chattels." In presence of so simple and 
effective a definition of the rights of the 
workingman, strikes sink into nothing- 
ness. And Magna Charta had been 
signed a hundred and fifty years before ! 
That document, however, in honor of 
which the free and enlightened Briton 
of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and 
his voice, was only in the name and on 
behalf of the barons. The English peo- 
ple derived under it neither name, place 
nor right. English liberty is only inci- 
dental, a foundling of untraced parent- 
age, a filiiis nullius. True, its growth 
was indirectly fostered by aught that 
checked the power of the monarch, and 
the nobles builded more wisely than they 
knew or intended when they brought 
Lackland to book, or to parchment, at 
Runnymede, not far down the river and 
close to the edge of the royal park. The 
memorable plain is still a meadow, kept 
ever green and inviolate of the plough. 
A pleasant row it is for the Eton young- 
sters to this spot. On Magna Charta 
island, opposite, they may take their rest 



9° 



UP THE THAMES. 



and their lunch, and refresh their minds 
as well with the memories of the place. 
The task of reform is by no means com- 
plete. There is room and call for fur- 
ther concessions in favor of the masses. 
These embryo statesmen have work 
blocked out for them in the future, and 
this is a good place for them to adjust to 
it the focus of their bright young optics. 
The monarchical idea is certainly pre- 
dominant in our present surroundings. 
The Thames flows from the castle and 
the school under two handsome erections 
named the Victoria and Albert bridges ; 
and when, turning our back upon Staines, 
just below Runnymede, with its bound- 
ary-stone marking the limit of the juris- 
diction of plebeian London's fierce de- 
mocracy, and inscribed " God preserve 
the City of London, 1280," we strike 
west into the Great Park, we soon come 
plump on George III. a great deal larger 
than life. The "best farmer that e'er 
brushed dew from lawn" is clad in an- 
tique costume with toga and buskins. 
Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups 
and with no bridle to speak of, the old 
gentleman looks calmly into the distance 
while his steed is in the act of stepping 
over a perpendicular precipice. This 
preposterous effort of the glyptic art has 
the one merit of serving as a finger- 
board. The old king points us to his 



palace, three miles off, at the end of the 
famous Long Walk. He did not him- 
self care to live at the castle, but liked 
to make his home at an obscure lodge 
in the park, the same from which, on 
his first attack of insanity, he set out in 
charge of two of his household on that 
melancholy ride to the retreat of Kew, 
more convenient in those days for med- 
ical attendance from London, and to 
which he returned a few months later 
restored for the time. Shortly after his 
recovery he undertook to throw up one 
of the windows of the lodge, but found 
it nailed down. He asked 'the cause, 
and was told, with inconsiderate blunt- 
ness, that it had been done during his 
illness to prevent his doing himself an 
injury. The perfect calmness and silence 
with which he received this explanation 
was a sufficient evidence of his recovery. 
Bidding the old man a final farewell, 
we accept the direction of his brazen 
hand and take up the line of march, 
wherein all traveling America has pre- 
ceded us, to the point wherefrom we 
glanced off so suddenly in obedience to 
the summons of Magna Charta. On 
either hand, as we thread the Long 
Walk, open glades that serve as so 
many emerald-paved courts to the mon- 
archs of the grove, some of them older 
than the whole Norman dynasty, with 




ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR. 



Ur THE THAMES 



9* 




STAINES CHURCH. 



Saxon summers recorded in their hearts. 
One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is 
called after the Conqueror. Among 
these we shall not find the most noted 
of Windsor trees. It was in the Home 
Park, on the farther or northern side of 
the castle, that the fairies were used to 
perform their 

dance of custom round about the oak 

Of Heme the hunter. 

Whether the genuine oak was cut down 
at the close of the last century, or was 
preserved, carefully fenced in and label- 
ed, in an utterly leafless and shattered 
state, to our generation, is a moot point. 
Certain it is that the most ardent Shake- 
spearean must abandon the hope of se- 
curing for a bookmark to his Merry 
Wives of Windsor one of the leaves 
that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck 
twelve," over the head of fat Japk. He 
has the satisfaction, however, of looking 
up at the identical bell-tower of the six- 
teenth century, and may make tryst with 
his imagination to await its midnight 
chime. Then he may cross the graceful 
iron bridge — modern enough, unhappily 
— to Datchet, and ascertain by actual 
experiment whether the temperature of 



the Thames has changed since the dump- 
ing into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot." 

Back at the castle, we must "do" it, 
after the set fashion. Reminders meet 
us at the threshold that it is in form a 
real place of defence, contemplative of 
wars and rumors of wars, and not a 
mere dwelling by any means in original 
design. A roadway, crooked and raked 
by frowning embrasures, leads up from 
the peaceful town to the particularly in- 
hospitable-looking twin towers of Henry 
VIII. 's gateway, in their turn command- 
ed by the round tower on the right, in 
full panoply of artificial scarp and ditch. 
Sentinels in the scarlet livery that has 
flamed on so many battlefields of all the 
islands and continents assist in proving 
that things did not always go so easy 
with majesty as they do now. But two 
centuries and more have elapsed since 
there happened any justification for this 
frown of stone, steel and feathers ; Ru- 
pert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 
having been Windsor's last taste of war, 
its sternest office after that having been 
the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here 
spent his " sorrowful and last Christmas." 
Once inside the gate, visions of peac? 



C)2 



UP '/'///■: tiiames. 



recur. The eye first 
I. ills (iii the most 
beautiful of all the 
assembled struc- 
tures, St. Geo 
Chapel. It. with the 
royal tomb - bouse, 
the il e a 11 c i v .nwl 
Winchestei tower, 
occupies the lefi or 

north sidi- of the low- 
er or western ward. 
In the real ol tin- 
chapel of St. c teorge 
are quartered in cozy 
cloisters the canons 
of tin' college nl that 
ilk — not great guns 
in any sense, but old 

e< clesiastical artil- 

le ry spiked after a 

uu ue or less noisy youth and laid up in 
varnished black for the rest of their 
days. Watch and ward over these mod- 
em equipments is kept by Julius Caesar's 
tower, as one of the most ancient erec- 
tions is of course called. Still farther to 

our left as we enter are the quarters of 
sundry other antiquated warriors, the 
Military Knights of Windsor. These 
are a few favored veterans, mostly de- 
e.iveil officers of the army and navy, 
who owe this shelter to royal favor and 

an endowment. The Ivy tower, west of 
the entrance, is followed in eastward suc- 
cession by those oi the gateway, Salis- 
bury, I "..liter and Bell towers. 

The line exterior of St. George's is 

more than matched by the carving and 

blazonry of the interior. The groined 

roof bears ihe devices of half a do/en 

early kings, beginning with Edward the 
Confessor. Along the choir stretch the 
stalls of the sovereign and knights-com- 
panions of the order o\ the Garter, each 
hung with banner, mantle, sword and 

helmet Better than these is the ham- 
mered steel tomb o( Edward IV., by 
Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. 

In the vaults beneath rest the victim of 
Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane 
Seymour ami Charles 1. The account 
o\ the appearance oi Charles' remains 

when his tomb was examined in I S 1 3 by 







>~^ VV 



NORMAN OA'l'E AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR. 



Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by sev- 
11. il of the royal family, is worth quoting. 
" The complexion of the face was dark 
and discolored. The forehead and tem- 
ples had lost little or nothing of their 
muscular substance. The cartilage of 
the nose was gone; but the left eye, in 
the moment of first exposure, was open 
and full, though it vanished almost im- 
mediately, and the pointed beard so cha- 
racteristic of tin- reign of King Charles 
was perfect. The shape of the face was 
a long oval ; many of the teeth remain- 
ed ; and the left ear, in consequence of 
the interposition of some unctuous mat- 
ter between it and the cere-cloth, was 
found entire. The hair was thick at the 
back part of the head, and in appear- 
ance nearly black. A portion of it, 
which has since been cleaned and dried, 
is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That 
of the beard was a reddish-brown. On 
the back part of the head it was not 
more than an inch in length, and had 
probably been cut so short for the con- 
venience o( the executioner, or perhaps 
by the piety o\ friends after death in 
order to furnish memorials of the un- 
happy king. On holding up the head 
to determine the place of separation 
from the bodv, the muscles of the neck 
had evidently contracted themselves con- 
siderably, and the fourth cervical verte- 



UP THE THAMES. 



93 




herne's oak. 

bra was found to be cut through its sub- 
stance transversely, leaving the face of 
the divided portions perfectly smooth 
and even — an appearance which could 
have been produced only by a heavy 
blow inflicted with a very sharp instru- 
ment, and which furnished the last proof 
wanting to identify Charles I." 

A highly-edifying spectacle this must 
have been to the prince regent and his 
brother Cumberland. The certainties 
of the past and the possibilities of the 
future were calculated to be highly sug- 
gestive. A French sovereign had but 
a few years before shared the fate of 
Charles, and a cloud of other kings were 
drifting about Europe with no very flat- 
tering prospect of coming soon to an- 
chor. Napoleon was showing his band- 
ed foes a good double front in Germany 
and Spain. His dethronement and the 
restoration of the Bourbons were not as 
yet contemplated. The Spanish succes- 
sion was whittled down to a girl — that 
is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The 
Hanoverian was in a similar condition, 
or worse, none of the old sons of the 
crazy old king having any legitimate 
children. The prince regent himself 
was highly unpopular with the mass 



of his people ; and the classes 
that formed his principal support 
were more so, by reason of the 
arrogance and exactions of the 
landed interest, the high price of 
grain and other heavy financial 
burdens consequent on the war, 
the arbitrary prosecutions and im- 
prisonment of leaders of the peo- 
ple, and the irregularities of his 
private life. 

But these sinister omens proved 
illusory. Leigh Hunt, W rax all and 
the rest made but ineffectual mar- 
tyrs ; the Bourbons straggled back 
into France and Spain, with such 
results as we see ; George IV. wea- 
thered, by no merit of his own, a 
fresh series of storms at home ; the 
clouds that lowered upon his house 
were made glorious summer by the 
advent of a fat little lady in 1819 
— the fat old lady of 1875 ; an d we 
step from the tomb of Charles in 
St. George's Chapel to that where George 
and William slumber undisturbed in the 
tomb - house, elaborately decorated by 
Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by 
the thrifty patriots of Cromwell's Parlia- 
ment, and bought in by the republican 
governor of the castle as "old brass." 
George was able, too, to add another 
story to the stature of the round tower 
or keep that marks the middle ward of 
the castle and looks down, on the rare 
occasion of a sufficiently clear atmo- 
sphere, on prosperous and no longer 
disloyal London. This same keep has 
quite a list of royal prisoners ; John of 
France and David II. and James I. of 
Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its 
interior ; so did the young earl of Sur- 
rey, a brother-poet, a century removed, 
of James. 

Leaving behind us the atmosphere of 
shackles and dungeons, we emerge, 
through the upper ward and the addi- 
tions of Queen Bess, upon the ample 
terrace, where nothing bounds us but the 
horizon. Together, the north, east and 
south terraces measure some two thou- 
sand feet. The first looks upon Eton, 
the lesser park of some five hundred 
acres which fills a bend of the Thames 



94 



UP THE THAMES. 



and the country beyond for many miles. 
The eastern platform, lying between the 
queen's private apartments and an ex- 
quisite private garden, is not always free 
to visitors. The south terrace presents 
to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight 
hundred acres, extending six miles, with 
a width of from half a mile to two miles. 
The equestrian statue at the end of the 
Long Walk is a conspicuous object. The 
prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken 
by scattered buildings, glades and av- 
enues, which take from it monotony and 
give it life. Near the south end is an 
artificial pond called Virginia Water, 
edged with causeless arches and ruins that 
never were anything but ruins, Chinese 
temples and idle toys of various other 
kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The an- 
cient trees, beeches and elms, of enor- 
mous size, and often projected individ- 
ually, are worth studying near or from 
a distance. The elevation is not so great 
as to bring out low-lying objects much 
removed. We see the summits of hills, 
each having its name, as St. Leon- 
ard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and 
glimpses of the river and of some coun- 
try-seats. St. Anne's Hill was the 
home of Fox ; at St. Leonard's dwelt the 
father of his rival and rival of his father, 
and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so 
hard to conceive as having ever been 
young, "lisped in numbers, for the num- 
bers came," natural descriptions, ethical 
reflections, vers de societe and all, for 



around him here there was food for them 
all. To descend from Pope in point of 
both time and romance, the view includes 
the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural 
experiments. Quite successful many of 
them were. He was a thoroughly prac- 
tical man — a circumstance which carried 
him by several routes across ploughed 
fields and through well - built streets, 
straight to the hearts of the English peo- 
ple. His memory is more warmly cher- 
ished, and impressed upon the stranger 
by more monuments, than that of any 
other of the German strain. It might 
have been less so had he succeeded in 
the efforts he is*now known to have made 
soon after his marriage to attain a higher 
nominal rank. He possessed, through the 
alliance of Leopold and Stockmar and 
the devotion of Victoria, kingly power 
without the name and the responsibility, 
and with that he became content. He 
used it cautiously and well when he em- 
ployed it at all. His position was a try- 
ing one, but he steered well through its 
difficulties, and died as generally trusted 
as he was at first universally watched. 
The love-match of 1840 was every way 
a success. 

Another figure, more rugged and less 
majestic, but not less respectable, will be 
associated with Victoria in the memories, 
if not the history proper, of her reign. 
This is John Brown, the canny and im- 
passive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to 
be neither prince nor king, and, prouder 




EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE. 



UP THE THAMES. 



95 



TFH 




QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR. 



than they, satisfied honestly to discharge 
the office of a flunkey without the very 
smallest trace of the flunkey spirit. He 
too has lived down envy and all un- 
charitableness. Contemptuous and se- 
rene amid the hootings of the mob and 
the squibs of the newspapers, he carries, 
as he has done for years, Her Majesty's 
shawl and capacious India-rubbers, at- 
tends her tramps through the Highlands 




EARL OK SUKKEY. 



and the Home Park, engineers her spe- 
cial trains and looks after her personal 
comfort even to the extent of ordering 
her to wear "mair claes " in a Scotch 
mist. The queen has embalmed him in 
her books, and he will rank among the 
heroes of royal authors as his namesake 
and countryman the Cameronian, by fa- 
vor of very similar moral qualities, does 
with those of more democratic procliv- 
ities. 

We cannot apply literally to the view 
from Windsor Thackeray's lines on " the 
castle towers of Bareacres :" 

I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country 

o'er; 
I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more. 

We scan what was once embraced in 
Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid 
his broad palm on a space a hundred 
and twenty miles round, and, like the 
lion in the fable of the hunting-party, in- 
formed his subjects that that was his 
share. The domain dwindled, as did 
other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 
the circuit was as much as seventy-seven 
miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thou- 
sand acres. The process of contraction 
has since been accelerated, and but little 
remains outside of the Great and Little 
Parks. Several villages of little note 
stand upon it. Of these Wokingham 
has the distinction of an ancient hostelry 
yclept the Rose ; and the celebrity of the 



9 6 



UP THE THAMES. 



Rose is a beautiful daughter of the land- 
lord of a century and a half ago. This 
lady missed her proper fame by the blun- 
der of a merry party of poets who one 
evening encircled the mahogany of her 
papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as 
such names as Gay and Swift could make 
it. Their combined efforts resulted in 
the burlesque of Molly Mog. These 
two and some others contributed each a 
verse in honor of the fair waiter. But 
they mistook her name, and the crown 
fell upon the less charming brow of her 
sister, whose cognomen was depraved 
from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak is 
pointed out as a corner of the old forest, 
a long way east of the park. Under its 
still spreading branches that forerunner 
of Luther is said to have preached. 
Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have 
sought inspiration under its shade. 

In the vast assemblage of the arboreal 
commonwealth that carpets the landscape 
the centuries are represented one with 
another. It is a leafy parliament that 
has never been dissolved or prorogued. 
One hoary member is coeval with the 
Confessor. Another sheltered William 



Rufus, tired from the chase. Under an- 
other gathered recruits bound with Cceur 
de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the 
bole of this was set up a practicing butt 
for the clothyard shafts that won Agin- 
court, and beneath that bivouacked the 
pickets of Cromwell. As we look down 
upon their topmost leaves there floats, 
high above our own level, " darkly paint- 
ed on the crimson sky," a member, not 
so old, of another commonwealth quite 
as ancient that has flourished among 
their branches from time immemorial. 
There flaps the solitary heron to the 
evening tryst of his tribe. Where is the 
hawk ? Will he not rise from some fair 
wrist among the gay troop we see canter- 
ing across yonder glade? Only the ad- 
dition of that little gray speck circling 
into the blue is needed to round off our 
illusion. But it comes not. In place of 
it comes a spirt of steam from the rail- 
way viaduct, and the whistle of an en- 
gine. Froissart is five hundred years 
dead again, and we turn to Bradshaw. 

Yet we have a "view of an interior" 
to contemplate before facing the lower 
Thames. And first, as the day is fading, 




WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE. 



UP THE THAMES. 



97 




LOCK A'l WINDSOR. 

\vc seek the dimmest part. We dive 
into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the 
curfew-tower, that used to send far and 
wide to many a Saxon cottage the hate- 
ful warning that told of servitude. How 
old the base of this tower is nobody 
seems to know, nor how far back it has 
served as a prison. The oldest initials 
of state prisoners inscribed on its cells 
date to 1600. The walls arc twelve feet 
thick, and must have begotten a pleas- 
ant feeling of perfect security in the 
breasts of the involuntary inhabitants. 
They did not know of a device contrived 
for the security of their jailers, which has 
but recently been discovered. This is a 
subterranean and subaqueous passage, 
alleged to lead under the river to Burn- 
ham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor 
will not be disposed to verify this state- 
ment or to stay long in the comparative- 



ly airy crypt. Damp 
as the British climate 
may be above ground, 
it is more so below. 
We emerge to the fine 
range of state apart- 
ments above, and sub- 
mit to the rule of guide 
and guide-book. 

St. George's Hall, 
the Waterloo gallery, 
the council - chamber 
and the Vandyck room 
are the most attra< ti\ e, 
all of them for the his- 
torical portraits they 
contain, and the first, 
besides, for its merit 
as an example of a 
Gothic interior and its 
associations with the 
order of the Garter, 
the knights of which 
society are installed in 
it. The specialty of the 
Waterloo room is t la- 
series of portraits ©f 
the leaders, civil and 
military, English and 
continental, of the last 
and successful league 
against Napoleon. 
They are nearly all by 
Lawrence, and of course admirable in 
their delineation of character. In that 
essential of a good portrait none of the 
English school have excelled Lawrence. 
We may rely upon the truth to Nature 
of each of the heads before us; for air 
and expression accord with what history 
tells us of the individuals, its verdict 
eked out and assisted by instructive mi- 
nutiae of lineament and meaning de- 
tected, in the " off-guard" of private inter- 
course, by the eye of a great painter and 
a lifelong student of physiognomy. We 
glance from the rugged Blucher to the 
wily Metternich, and from the philosophic 
Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. 
The dandies George IV. and Alexander 
are here, but Brummel is left out. The 
gem of the collection is I'ius VII., Law- 
rence's masterpiece, widely familial by 
engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems 



UP THE THAMES. 



to have been in the artist's mind, but 
that work is not improved on, unless in 
so far as the critical eye of our day may 
delight in the more intricate tricks of 



chiaroscuro and effect to which Law- 
rence has recourse. " Brunswick's fated 
chieftain " will interest the votaries of 
C'hilde Harold. Could he have looked 




forward to 1870, he would perhaps have 
chosen a different side at Waterloo, as 
his father might at Jena, and elected to 
figure in oils at Versailles rather than at 
Windsor. Incomparably more destruc- 



tive to the small German princes have 
been the Hohenzollerns than the Bona- 
partes. 

We torget these nineteenth -century 
people in the council-chamber, wherein 



UP THE THAMES. 



99 




ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY. 



reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and 
even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really ex- 
ecuted all the canvases ascribed to him 
in English collections, the common im- 
pressions of his habits of painting but 
little, and not often finishing that, do 
him great injustice. Martin Luther is 
here, by Holbein, and the countess of 
Desmond, the merry old lady 

Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten, 
And died of a fall from a cherry tree then, 

is embalmed in the bloom of one hun- 
dred and twenty and the gloom of Rem- 
brandt. The two dozen pictures in this 
room form nearly as odd an association 
as any like number of portraits could do. 
Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage 
interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince 
Rupert looks down with lordly scorn on 
Jonah pitched into the sea by the com- 
bined efforts of the two Poussins. The 
link between Berghem's cows and Del 
Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless sup- 
plied to the minds of the hanging com- 
mittee by recollections of the manger. 
Our thrifty Pennsylvania]!, West, is as- 
signed the vestibule. Five of his "ten- 
acre " pictures illustrate the wars of Ed- 
ward III. and the Black Prince. The 
king's closet and the queen's closet are 
tilled mostly by the Flemings. Van- 
dyck's room finally finishes the list. It 
has, besides a portrait of himself and 
several more of the first Charles and his 
family in every pose, some such queer, 
or worse than queer, commoners as Tom 



Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and 
Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to 
novelists of a certain school. 

Vast sums have been expended on the 
renovation and improvement of the castle 
during the past half century. With Vic- 
toria it has been more popular as a resi- 
dence than with any of her predecessors 
since the fourteenth century. What, 
however, with its greater practical prox- 
imity to London, due to railways, and 
what with the queen's liking for solitude 
since the death of her consort, the more 
secluded homes of Osborne and Balmoral 
have measurably superseded it in her af- 
fections. Five hundred miles of distance 
to the Dee preclude the possibility of the 
dumping on her, by means of excursion 
trains, of loyal cockneydom. She is as 
thoroughly protected from that inunda- 
tion in the Isle of Wight, the average Lon- 
doner having a fixed horror of sea-sick- 
ness. The running down, by her private 
steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts 
in the Solent would be a hazardous experi- 
ment, if temporarily effective in keeping 
home invaders at bay. Holding as her 
right and left bowers those two sanctu- 
aries at the opposite ends of her island 
realm, she can play a strong hand in the 
way of personal independence, and cease 
to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by 
the rights of the masses. It is well for 
the country that she should be left as 
far as possible to consult her own com- 
fort, ease and health at least as freely as 



I J' THE THAMES. 



the humblest of her subjects. The con- 
tinuance of her life is certainly a political 
desideratum. It largely aids in main- 
taining a wholesome balance between 
conservatism and reform. So long as 
she lives there will be no masculine will 
to exaggerate the former or obstruct the 
latter, as notably happened under George 
III. and William IV. Her personal 
bearing is also in her favor. Her popu- 
larity, temporarily obscured a few years 
ago, is becoming as great as ever. It 
has never been weakened by any mis- 
step in politics, and so long as that can 



be said will be exposed to no serious 
danger. 

We are far from being at the end of 
the upper Thames. Oxford, were there 
no other namable place, is beyond us. 
But we have explored the denser portion 
— the nucleus of the nebula of historic 
stars that stretches into the western sky 
as seen from the metropolis. We lay 
aside our little lorgnette. It has shown 
us as much as we can map in these pages, 
and that we have endeavored to do with 
at least the merit of accuracy. 




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